Jonathan Tropper Quotations

Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

Nobody wants to rock their own life. But, on the other hand, when your life does get rocked, it affords you a certain level of emotional honesty. It liberates you to be who you really are.

I have a handful of leather jackets, and I love them all. I think most men my age do, and it can be traced back to the Fonz and Danny Zuko.

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.

Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.

When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

I still enjoy the tactile sensation of holding a book. But when I need to read fast for work, I use the Kindle App on my iPad.

Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.

'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.

You never have to change a book for budget.

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

I'm at my desk before nine, and I go all day. I'm not necessarily productive all day, but really, who is?

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky.

I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.

You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them for being there on those scary nights, for giving you a place to run to where your nightmares couldn't follow, the one place where you could descend finally into slumber knowing, at least for the time being, that you were completely safe.

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.

...you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

↑ top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

We're all clichés, all following scripts that have been written and played out long before we landed the role.

Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.

I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

Loneliness doesn’t exist on any single plane of consciousness. It’s generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you’re reminded of what this baby’s carrying under the hood.

We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.

Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.

Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.

It's amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.

If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack in the ass.

Don't you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?

The future just isn't what it used to be

At this point in my life, I'm not looking for any happy endings. I'm just looking to get things started.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.

What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it’s for the last time?

Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they're being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube - guys skulking in their T-shirts and cargo shorts, girls in low-slung jeans and flip-flops, pimples and breasts and tattoos and lipstick and legs and bra straps, and cigarettes; a colorful, sexy melange. I feel old and tired and I just want to be them again, want to be young and stupid, filled with angst and attitude and unbridled lust. Can I have a do-over, please? I swear to God I'll make a real go of it this time.

Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.

...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.

It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.

I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.

Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue.

But the muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.

You lost your wife, Douglas. My heartbreaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don’t even get to mourn.

And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.

Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.

You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.

As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage of being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.

There are some people out there who don't wait for what come next. They decide what should come next and they go and make it happen.

Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.

I want to explain everything to him, show him that it’s really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.

We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.

I loved her for the way she embraced the unknown, how she opened herself up to every experience. When I was with her, she opened me up, too, stirred my passion and heightened my every sensation. Which was great, until she left me and all my heightened senses to deal with the heartache of losing her.

I would have done the same thing I did. I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn't you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there's no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I know better....The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn't you.

I'm generally somebody who hopes for the best. It's not what one ought to do in my line of work [screenwriting], but it is what I do.

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn’t know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you’re simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.

You're terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.

Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people.

Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.

I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.

I blame Hollywood for skewing perspectives. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily ever-after is a forgone conclusion.

The whole purpose of screenwriting is to convey everything through action and dialogue and not explanation and exposition. To me, there are movies where voiceover works really well because it does something more than exposition; it actually becomes a tonal element of the movie.

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

Sometimes you walk past a pretty girl on the street there's something beyond beauty in her face, something warm and smart and inviting, and in the three seconds you have to look at her, you actually fall in love, and in those moments, you can actually know the taste of her kiss, the feel of her skin against yours, the sound of her laugh, how she'll look at you and make you whole. And then she's gone, and in the five seconds afterwards, you mourn her loss with more sadness than you'll ever admit to.

I'm really not a fan of voiceovers; I think they become a crutch.

Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's.

You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing

You can do everything differently in a novel. Hero narrates the novel; we're in his head. You're hearing all his thought processes and you're hearing him call himself out on his bad behavior. You don't have the benefit of that narrator in a movie. What you see a character do, very often, becomes that much more important because you don't have him editorializing it for you.

I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.

I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it.