Quotes from John Logan

Reality may be hard, but it's all we have.

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend... One day the black will swallow the red.

I would rather die on my feet than spend a lifetime on my knees

You want to be a thing? Make yourself that thing.

Was it the day you realized your parents aren't perfect? When you got your first long trousers? Going to school? Saying hello? Saying goodbye? Your heart opens? It breaks? It heals? It breaks again? Which is it?

Of that duality that makes us who we are, he is wholly evil. Duality? We are all two things in a way, are we not? Deep in the marrow. Angel and devil. Light and dark. The pull between the two is the active verb which energizes our lives.

The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.

I fell in love with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone and Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Huston.

We wanted 'Hugo' to be a cornucopia of cinema, a celebration of everything we do in movies.

The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush.

I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.

By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does.

I couldn't write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward's an idol, but his plays are serious to me. 'Private Lives' and 'Design for Living' both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work.

If you look at the muscularity of something like 'Wicked' and the way it has just spawned sort of generations of young people wanting to get involved in the theatre - it's brilliant.

Realistically, it's the great truism that screenwriters are fungible, that at the end of the day a studio is not going to want to fire a movie star. And they're really not going to want to fire a star director because the director has the hand on the tiller of a ship.

'Coriolanus' has been around for 400 years, and it's going to be around for another 400 years, and nothing I can do is going to mess it up. So, going into it, I felt sort of very free to look at it as a filmmaker does.

Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

I grew up loving monsters. I'm just a total monster geek. When I was a kid, I had the Aurora monster models, and I would make them. I loved the Universal horror movies and the Hammer movies. I just had an affinity for them.

I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do.

Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I'm a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don't understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me.

Working on 'Skyfall' was the most enjoyable experience I've ever had on a movie, ever.