S.A. David Quotes

All of us. All of us. We're doomed.

Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.

How can I be secure? Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what's beyond measure? That's a sickness. That's a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.

The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.

Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.

Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.

Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.

Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.

I won't ever do e-mail.

In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.

It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.

The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.

IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.

What I loved about it was language-wise it wasn't that finely-tuned-perfect-insult-for-the-perfect-situation that sometimes we try and do on Veep.

I was a Fry & Laurie fan, I was a Blackadder fan, I was a House fan and he [ Hugh Laurie]s a pleasure.

I'd like to give every member of our cast a best supporting comedy Emmy.

I love Veep so I felt like there was a lot I could bring to it.

All of a sudden, making a Spanish-American War joke. I think you sort of had to go to probably to an American high school to have remembered that.

As for being on Twitter, I enjoy it tremendously, and it is wonderfully overwhelming to see people not just digging it and liking it.

If that had been my last show last night, you'd be talking to the new guy, asking the same questions that I got.

I'm certainly never going to say that someone is prettier than Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but someone who would make her crazy for being young and good-looking.

My first instinct was Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) cannot be president of the United States. She needs to lose because it's the thing she wants most on the planet Earth.

I'm a little bit of a news political junkie, a little bit of a reader of history.

I enjoy biographies and whatnot. I'm also a fan of presidential libraries. I've visited quite a few of them, especially the more modern ones.

I was born in 1970 and I got to see a little bit of [Richard] Nixon's attempts at redefining himself. I saw [Gerald] Ford.

It's gratifying that people are watching that [Veep] intently and that hard. So it's been really nice and it's been really fun.

My basic philosophy is that no human being is a saint.

I said that I'm only there to write the truth, I'm not going to cover anything up, but I'll put everything in context and get as close to the truth of this person as I can.

It is?classic Bill Clinton, sincere and deceptive at the same time, requiring a careful reading between the lines.

Well, there is something beautiful about ruins. I mean, in one sense it's not that different from going to Rome and looking at the Forum. But it's changing. It truly is. I'm optimistic but skeptical.

And then the industry itself was so cocky about what they were doing that they weren't seeing what was coming on the horizon with Japan and Germany and other places that were building smaller cars.

Well, there were several things. One was that the industry itself built in Detroit was abandoning the city - taking factories elsewhere, the corporate headquarters elsewhere.

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.

It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom, when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable.

What do any of us ever truly know?

The morning’s recollection of the emptiness of the day before. Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.

You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.

I like to think of the senses as having a volume control in the brain. The volume turns up on all the other senses when you lose one.

There's no question that positive thinking has a place in business. [...just as it has in the the rest of a happy, successful person's life.]