Robert Towne Quotes & Sayings

If you have a good ear for dialogue, you just can't help thinking about the way people talk. You're drawn to it. And the obsessive interest in it forces you to develop it. You almost can't help yourself. — Robert Towne

I'm excited and encouraged to see people getting involved with their public lands and forests. We really need the public's help to repair these heavily used recreation sites. — Robert Towne

I'm not supposed to be the one that's caught with his pants down. — Robert Towne

But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it. — Robert Towne

She's my daughter. She's my sister. — Robert Towne

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough. — Robert Towne

What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same. — Robert Towne

You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process? — Robert Towne

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made. — Robert Towne

If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life. — Robert Towne

Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell - he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it. — Robert Towne

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible. — Robert Towne

It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s. — Robert Towne

It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue. — Robert Towne

Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water. — Robert Towne

Every search for a hero must begin with something which every hero requires - a villain. — Robert Towne

In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically. — Robert Towne

Larry Grobel senses there are no answers in life, only questions. Good ones. — Robert Towne

People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life. — Robert Towne

Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying — Robert Towne

I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business. — Robert Towne

You must be dumber than you think I think you are. — Robert Towne

But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie. — Robert Towne

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama. — Robert Towne

How much are you worth?
I have no idea. How much do you want?
Naw.I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Oh, my, yes.
Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
The future, Mr. Gittes! The future! — Robert Towne

The straight roads are the roads of progress, the crooked roads are thee roads of genius. — Robert Towne

Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian. — Robert Towne