William Monahan

The novel may be dead as a commercial form. When art forms things die as commercial forms, something happens to the practice…

— William Monahan

I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.

— William Monahan

I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of…

— William Monahan

I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always…

— William Monahan

You never know what people are going to go and see.

— William Monahan

I've got things I have to do in fiction to sort of register my existence, before I kick the bucket, but it…

— William Monahan

As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're…

— William Monahan

If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you…

— William Monahan

I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going…

— William Monahan

Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you…

— William Monahan

I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.

— William Monahan

The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as…

— William Monahan

I had a guy at the Groucho bar clawing at my arm nearly in tears saying that until he saw The Departed…

— William Monahan

My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person…

— William Monahan

T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne…

— William Monahan

The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I…

— William Monahan

Casting is always subject to availabilities.

— William Monahan

You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is…

— William Monahan

You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.

— William Monahan

Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true,…

— William Monahan

As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.

— William Monahan

I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty…

— William Monahan

I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense…

— William Monahan

Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's…

— William Monahan

I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.

— William Monahan