Top 30 Kenneth Lonergan Quotes

I remember the kind of teenager I was, the kind of teenager I wanted to be, and then the kind of teenagers that were all around me. Life is lived on such a big scale in those years – and such an embarrassing one as well.

When I walk onto a film set, I become frightened and nervous. There’s all this equipment, all these people, and most of them do things you don’t know how to do. I didn’t come from a film background.

To me, ‘director‘s cut‘ means that what was released before was somebody else‘s cut. That, to me, always implies that what was released wasn’t what the director wanted.

I wrote a play once called ‘Lobby Hero,’ which I thought turned out very well, but there’s no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to.

I remember yelling at my mother one time, horribly. I was in tenth grade or something like that, and I hadn’t done something, and she misunderstood because my stepfather told her something that was wrong that I hadn’t done.

There are some situations in life that are simply not funny, and there’s nothing funny about them, but they’re rare, and they don’t last all that long.

You can shoot a film in New York without seeing the Empire State Building. Or Starbucks… although the latter is much less realistic.

The really funny comedies to me are always the ones that are played the straightest or given the most emotional content. And when people start making faces and setting things up and commenting and winking at you, I don’t find that to be very funny.

You’re thinking about the physical consequences about what you’re writing if you’re going to direct it. If you’re not going to direct it, then it’s somebody else’s problem, and they’ll solve it.

There’s a lot of pressure on a film set that’s more immediate than the pressure in the theater where you’re nervous about what’s going to happen next week.

I love accents, I love listening to people talk, I like to try to emulate it as accurately as I can.

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

I love ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’

I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves – they don’t need be told what to.

Sometimes films have no rehearsals – you don’t have real rehearsals on the set because the day is so dominated by the schedule.

Actors are very demanding because they have nowhere to hide. If I write a scene, it doesn’t turn out very well, I don’t ever have to show it to anyone; when you turn the camera on, or when you walk on stage, they have to feel like what’s happening is real.

I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.

I still haven‘t quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there’s nothing wrong with dialogue in movies.

I can remember when I was 24, and I broke up with my first serious girlfriend for the first time. She was a very nice person, but she had a little bit of a tendency toward melodrama… Her response was to take the key to my apartment off of her key chain and hand it back to me.

My personal pride is not strong enough to make me brave. But I don’t know why I equate being brave with fighting.

I know there are some actors who won‘t switch their accents off when they’re on set and like to be called by their character‘s names. That works for them, and that’s great.

Very often what will happen between actors is that they’ll develop kind of a ghost relationship in real life that reflects their relationship on screen or in the play that they’re doing. In fact, I’d say that happens almost every time. I don’t know why that happens, but it seems very common.

I do a lot of improvising when I’m writing, and I work very hard on the scripts… they are written very much in an actor-friendly way.

It’s not a character flaw to become an adult.

I’ve done a lot of assignment work in my life, and the only way you can do it is to make it your own as quickly as possible, and then you give it back.

There’s something about the impact of a big screen that means something to me, even though I realize almost every film is fated to be seen for a year in theaters, and then forever after on television.

I actually think storyboards are great. I don’t draw well enough to do them myself. I’ve only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in ‘Margaret‘: one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.

I personally don’t need to see a story about a person that starts up miserable and ends up worse.

You discover two things when you’re a teenager. One, that your parents are not the idols that you thought they were when you were growing up, if you had nice parents. And two, that you have power over them, and you can upset them and confront them and attack them.