Berta Mawk

“Every cold case is someone’s failure. And while every failure has many illegitimate parents, usually, one person gets stuck with the kid. Scholz was this ugly baby’s mother. And mommas can be very temperamental about their babies, especially the ugly ones.”
― J.K. Franko, Killing Johnny Miracle

“If every minute of time elapsed on the screen equals in length of time every other minute, and obviously it does, and if time on the screen equals importance to the audience, that is, one minute of screen time gives equal weight to the emotional, dramatic, narrative, and every other aspect of experiencing a movie as every other minute, and it does, then we know something important we need to know about screenplays.”
― Dan Joseph Decker, ANATOMY OF A SCREENPLAY THIRD EDITION

“If you always try to subjugate people by coercion, because you are strong, then sooner or later you will run into somebody who is just as strong, if not stronger. Then you'll be in trouble.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly commercially driven. And some if it is important art. I think 'The Simpsons' is important art. On the other hand, it's also, in my opinion, relentlessly corrosive to the soul and everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous. Maybe I'm old but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I have to walk away and look at a flower.

If there's something to be talked about, that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the 'inner sap,' the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people.”
― David Foster Wallace