Kevin D. Williamson Quotes & Sayings

Detroit's political leadership is a parasite that has outgrown its host. — Kevin D. Williamson

A lot of it is just waking up and putting one foot in front of the other and going where I just go, a natural progression. The other thing is I do have a lot of ideas. TV seems to be where it happens faster, quicker. You are trying to get a movie off the ground, and it's very difficult. One movie takes two years to make — Kevin D. Williamson

If you're not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it's probably not a legitimate concern of the state. — Kevin D. Williamson

The thing that makes me feel young, honestly, is making television. It's the only thing that excites me, the way that you get excited when you're a kid. That's why I still do it. — Kevin D. Williamson

I'm always going to look and refer to things and remember things differently than perhaps a real or honest viewer can. I'm tainted with knowing too much. But I still very much love it. — Kevin D. Williamson

The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face. — Kevin D. Williamson

Even as a child, I just leaned towards the scary. I remember seeing Halloween, for the first time. I snuck into the theater and was sitting there with a group of friends in the front row, and I turned back to look at the audience. They were screaming and interacting with the screen and were interacting with Jamie Lee Curtis as she walked through that horrible night. I just thought, "I want to do that." — Kevin D. Williamson

The intersection of authoritarian politics with homoeroticism is a subject of some historical interest, from the Nazi enthusiasm for the sculptures of Josef Thorak and Arno Breker to the Italian Futurists' ritual rejection of all things feminine. That mostly petered out around the time Francisco Franco stopped rocking that fur in official portraiture, though it has made occasional ignominious appearances in Democratic politics too. But the combination of homoerotic fascination and gay panic that marks the Trump movement is truly remarkable, something unseen in American politics. It — Kevin D. Williamson

I like to multitask. I love the process of the storytelling in television. I love the serial. Even my stab at doing a procedural show was still very much serialized. I'm such a serialized storyteller. I feel like the story never ends. I want it to go and go and go. However, with cable and streaming now it's endless. You can do anything. — Kevin D. Williamson

Horror films had died a little bit before Scream came around. That was one of the reasons I wrote it. I wanted to write something that wasn't being made right now and maybe sell if I come up with a new horror film. Because no one is watching those movies. Let's do it. That was my whole goal, and it paid off. I feel like it's never stopped. — Kevin D. Williamson

Donald Trump and Paris Hilton share an occupation: publicity whore. Paris Hilton is better at it. — Kevin D. Williamson

It would be difficult to find in the United States any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education. — Kevin D. Williamson

I look at it [Scream movie] and think, wow, I can't believe I wrote that at such a young age. I also look at it and go, ohhh ouch, that dialogue, whoa. — Kevin D. Williamson

If you can get the audience to talk to the screen, I just thought that was so cool, and I wanted to do that. And I just leaned towards the scary and the thriller. I find it very emotional. I want to make emotional horror. If I can make you cry, than you have a full experience. — Kevin D. Williamson

Health care and education are too important NOT to be left to the free market. — Kevin D. Williamson

I love to go back and write and direct another film one day, but that's on the backburner for now because I'm involved with so much television at the moment. — Kevin D. Williamson

Benign environmentalists are opposed to pollution, as all sensible people are; malign environmentalists are opposed to energy and most of what it enables. — Kevin D. Williamson

I'm a huge fan of horror. I can't handle all the blood and gore, but that's what The Following was meant to be. It was meant to be a genre show, a little movie, a little scary genre film every week. That was our goal. That's what Kevin Bacon and I wanted to do. — Kevin D. Williamson

The great scandal of American life is that we pay for German levels of government without enjoying the related benefits. — Kevin D. Williamson

The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn't much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare - presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians. — Kevin D. Williamson

I do believe there's been a lull of slasher films. There have been a few that I guess would fall under the genre of slasher. Like You're Next, which I thought was fun. There have been a few really good slasher films, but for the most part, that's sort of died away at the moment. — Kevin D. Williamson

It is one of history's great ironies that capitalists built decent and humane societies on the basis of an amoral approach to the economics of pricing, whereas socialists built exploitative and inhumane societies on the basis of a morally inflamed approach to economics. — Kevin D. Williamson

It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors. — Kevin D. Williamson

Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives - and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers' dream of command and control. — Kevin D. Williamson

Yeah, I love A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was just a fan. I was such an avid fan. I remember being on the set talking about a sequence and he started asking me about maybe staging it a little different. I realized - I think he was shocked that I knew his work so well - I remember I started going like, "Why don't we do it like The Last House on the Left, where you had the girl on the ground ... " — Kevin D. Williamson