Quotes from David Benioff

McCullers is one of those rare writers who remembers what childhood is like. Not incidents, which anyone can recall, but states of mind, which are so difficult to recreate.

the lonliest sound in the world is other people making love.

I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue.

Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.

With screenplays, it's all about being as concise as possible. If you have a scene that's set in a bar, you just have to write, 'Interior: Bar.'

Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.

'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.

Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.

It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don't have a good ending, it's the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of 'The Kite Runner,' and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes.

I've never flown a kite.

If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

The longer you work in this business [movie], the more you start to be able to see the carpentry. You can see where things are going, and it's harder to surprise you, as a reader

It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi.

We have amazing stunt performers and in Miguel Sapochnik, a director who's so good at spending hours and hours and hours on every shot beforehand, so that he knows exactly what he wants when he gets to the battlefield on the day. We only shoot ten-hour days, so you have to pack a lot into those ten hours.

'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.