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"To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'"
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"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."

"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."

"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."

"A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee's dream on hold."

"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."

"Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy."

"To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job."

"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."

"When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation."
Explore more quotes by John Sayles

"If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day."

"I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'."

"My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem."

"I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me."

"We just said, 'Okay, you're in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you're on camera, that's your wardrobe.' But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised."

"I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean."

"For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie."

"Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money."
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