Some time in the night, William Goldman died in his sleep. He was at home in New York and passed with a solid claim to being the greatest screenwriter who ever lived, not to mention a fine novelist who penned several underrated gems as well as a pair of memoirs that are still passed around today as a guide to the movie business and a kind of bible for writers, or aspiring writers, or anyone who ever sat down in front of a blank page and suffered over it but charged ahead anyway. Goldman was an Oscar winner, a generous mentor, a hard-nosed poet who mastered the muck of the Hollywood machine—the man who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man (the novel and the screenplay), The Princess Bride (same), fixed up a dozen scripts for each one he put his name on, and memorialized the whole cinematic era in his engaging, inimitable way in those priceless memoirs.
Goldman helped create and define the golden age of thrillers, which is why we’re celebrating him on this site today. He was also a writer’s writer: a man who thought about the craft, offered comfort and encouragement where he could, and commiserated when you needed it. We’ve spent the morning scouring his screenplays, novels, and memoirs for a couple dozen quotes that capture just a little part of that Goldman magic and, if read carefully, offer up a kind of guide to life, or to writing about it anyhow.
__________________________________
Life Lessons: Mistakes, Failure, and the Occasional Small Victory
__________________________________
“Nobody knows anything.”
—Adventures in the Screen Trade
“Any experience is profitable if you allow it to be, all actions are profitable, no matter how badly you may suffer from them.”
—Marathon Man
“Have you ever failed?
Only in life.”
—The Ghost and the Darkness (Goldman script)
“All non-denial denials—we’re dirty guys and they doubt we were ever virgins but they don’t say the story is inaccurate.”
—All the President’s Men (Goldman script)
“If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.”
—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Goldman script)
“Boy, y’know, every time I see ‘Hole in the Wall’ again, it’s like seeing it fresh for the first time, and every time that happens, I keep asking myself the same question, ‘How can I be so damn stupid as to keep comin’ back here?'”
—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Goldman script)
“We’re under a lot of pressure, too, and you put us there–not that I want it to worry you–nothing’s riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press plus the reputation of a hundred-year-old paper plus the jobs of the two thousand people who work there—(still building)—but none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I’m gonna lose my temper.
—All the President’s Men (Goldman script)
__________________________________
Writing, and What’s It All About?
__________________________________
“The writing is never what takes the most time. It’s trying to figure what you’re going to put down that fills the days. With anger at your own ineptitude, with frustration that nothing is happening inside your head, with panic that maybe nothing will ever happen inside your head, with blessed little moments that somehow knit together so that you can begin to visualize a scene.”
—Adventures in the Screen Trade
“I write out of revenge”
—Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade
“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you’re trying a screenplay, you know it’s never going to be Bergman. If it’s a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk. But if you’re a writer, that’s what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence. You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I’m going to do it this one time. I’m going to tell you things you never knew. I’ve—got—secrets!”
—Adventures in the Screen Trade
“I write to balance the teeter-totter of my childhood. Graham Greene once said one of the great things: an unhappy childhood is a writer’s goldmine.”
—Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade
__________________________________
Making a Career in the Arts
__________________________________
“It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.”
—Adventures in the Screen Trade
“I don’t think most people realize—and there’s no reason they should—the amount of demeaning garbage you have to take if you want a career in the arts.”
—Adventures in the Screen Trade
“If you write movies, you never know who the enemy is. Someone is going to fuck you, that’s a given.”
—Four Screenplays with Essays
“There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.”
—Adventures in the Screen Trade
__________________________________
On Romance
__________________________________
‘I know this must come as something of a surprise to you, since all I’ve ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more.”
—The Princess Bride
“But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid—that had to mean something.”
—The Silent Gondoliers
“My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.”
—The Princess Bride
__________________________________
On Suffering
__________________________________
“That’s the real lesson. That’s the loser’s share, just pain, pure and simple, pain and torture, no hotshot lawyers running around trying to see that justice is done. I think we’d have a nice peaceful place here if all you warmakers knew you better not start something because if you lost, agony was just around the bend.”
—Marathon Man
“Is it safe?”
—Marathon Man
“They have an expression in prize fighting: “Everyone has a plan until they’ve been hit.” Well my friend, you’ve just been hit. The getting up is up to you.”
—The Ghost and the Darkness (Goldman script)
__________________________________
On Death
__________________________________
“Life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”
—The Princess Bride
“Lord, may we bury no gamblers today.”
—Maverick (Goldman script)
And I know we must die. But it must be so that Misery can live. We have the power to give Misery eternal life. We must finish the book.
—Misery (Goldman script)
“Szell was almost dead now, but Babe just had time to get it in.
‘Have a swell eternity,’ Babe said…”
—Marathon Man
