Top 50 David Benioff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The secret to winning a woman is calculated neglect.”

— David Benioff

2. “There’s never been a fantasy movie of the epic battle of good versus evil that ended with evil winning.”

— David Benioff

3. “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.”

— David Benioff

4. “To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days.”

— David Benioff

5. “I’m just not a natural teacher.”

— David Benioff

6. “This life came so close to never happening...”

— David Benioff

7. “This is good, life must continue, we are fighting barbarians, but we must remain human.”

— David Benioff

8. “Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”

— David Benioff

9. “Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?”

— David Benioff

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

— David Benioff

11. “Contrary to popular belief, the experience of terror does not make you braver. Perhaps though, it is easier to hide your fear when you’re afraid all the time.”

— David Benioff

12. “I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”

— David Benioff

13. “I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn’t help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.”

— David Benioff

14. “She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss.”

— David Benioff

15. “There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.”

— David Benioff

16. “Every time something bad happens, like we lose a day because of weather or an actor gets injured or anything else happens, the schedule has to change. It’s the most challenging Tetris puzzle.”

— David Benioff

17. “I’ve never flown a kite.”

— David Benioff

18. “I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can’t make the music his own.”

— David Benioff

19. “Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny.”

— David Benioff

20. “The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye...”

— David Benioff

21. “De waarheid mag dan vreemder zijn dan de verbeelding, maar vraagt wel om een betere redacteur. Het grootste deel van het leven van een mens is de moeite van het onthouden niet waard.”

— David Benioff

22. “If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.’ ” “Old one.” “Jokes only get old if they’re good. Otherwise, who keeps telling them?” “People like you who aren’t funny?”

— David Benioff

23. “The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening.”

— David Benioff

24. “Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”

— David Benioff

25. “You don’t like the girl. You don’t know what color eyes she has, you don’t like her.”

— David Benioff

26. “I am aware that I am aware.”

— David Benioff

27. “Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.′ He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. ‘And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life’.”

— David Benioff

28. “It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.”

— David Benioff

29. “Ah, the farmer, he kicks the first sack, ‘Meow,’ and so on. He kicks the second sack, and the boy inside says, ‘Woof!’ Pretending to be – ” Kolya pointed at me to finish the sentence. “A cow.” “A dog. When he kicks the third sack, the boy inside says, ‘Potatoes!’ ” We walked in silence. “Well,” said Kolya at last, “other people think it’s funny.” On.”

— David Benioff

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

— David Benioff

31. “And I didn’t grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal – to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn’t have the novels, maybe I’d be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.”

— David Benioff

32. “Your mother and sister weren’t on the radio telling us all to be brave. Look, I don’t expect composers and poets to be heroes. I just don’t like hypocrites.”

— David Benioff

33. “The front door is usually unlocked and there is no alarm system. They don’t wear their seat belts in the car; they don’t wear suntan lotion in the sun. They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don’t even believe in him.”

— David Benioff

34. “Start admiring the vastness of the forest and a tree will surely fall on you, bashing your skull for the crime of perspective.”

— David Benioff

35. “I was a runt from birth. Big nosed, black haired, skin scribbled with acne – let’s admit I was no girl’s idea of a catch. But war made me more attractive. Others dwindled as the ration cards were cut and cut again, halving those who looked like circus strongmen before the invasion. I had no muscle to lose. Like the shrews that kept scavenging while the dinosaurs toppled around them, I was built for deprivation.”

— David Benioff

36. “With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it’s more a polite suggestion.”

— David Benioff

37. “You’re a writer. Make it up.”

— David Benioff

38. “I like having my own story remain my story.”

— David Benioff

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

39. “Fiction novels, that’s my game.”

— David Benioff

40. “Hollywood screenwriters tend to have the longevity of NFL running backs. So the truth is no one can put more pressure on us than we put on ourselves.”

— David Benioff

41. “He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.”

— David Benioff

42. “Vika sat next to me, chewing on her fingernails. She chewed methodically, not an anxious person with a nervous habit but a butcher sharpening his knives.”

— David Benioff

43. “A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.”

— David Benioff

44. “You must always kiss as if kissing will be outlawed at dawn.”

— David Benioff

45. “Everyone knew this was the episode that was going to make or break the season.”

— David Benioff

46. “The eternal challenge for screenwriter adapters is figuring out how to make something work on screen, when so much of what made it work in the book were the thoughts of the character, and obviously wanting to avoid voiceover.”

— David Benioff

47. “This wasn’t the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn’t.”

— David Benioff

48. “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.”

— David Benioff

49. “She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.”

— David Benioff

50. “In certain ways I am deeply stupid. I don’t say this out of modesty. I believe that I’m more intelligent than the average human being, though perhaps intelligence should not be looked at as a single gauge, like a speedometer, but as a full array of tachometers, odometers, altimeters, and the rest.”

— David Benioff