Top 25 David Benioff Quotes

I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.

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

I’ve never flown a kite.

My favorite food in the world is hard shell crabs from Maryland.

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?

Just the notion of falling for someone, that involves weakness.

I’m just not a natural teacher.

If you’re writing a screenplay for a feature, you don’t have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

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.

I don’t type my sentences on an arena‘s pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans – I don’t feel pressure to please a crowd.

Some of my happiest childhood memories are going to the movies with my dad and seeing whatever was out that week. In 1977, when I was 7, it was ‘Star Wars.’ That was a life-changer.

The reality is, ‘Game of Thrones’ has been a successful show for HBO, which has put us in a position to come and pitch another show and get them excited about it. And that’s what helped get us here.

‘Game Of Thrones‘ was too big a canvas for a movie, but ‘Dirty White Boys’ is like a great old Western: there’s so much compression, and it’s so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.

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.

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

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

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.

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it’s the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.

Sometimes I get jealous when I’m reading a great book by a younger writer. But ‘White Tiger‘ is so good, I almost forgot to hate Aravind Adiga.

I like having my own story remain my story.

‘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.

We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don’t want to know – because why ruin a story?

You just do the best you can and hope people see the potential in it.

I can’t measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world’s most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.

Iwan Rheon is a great actor, and he’s going to go on to a long brilliant career. And most of the characters he’ll play will not be evil. He’s not one of those who can only play a bad guy.