Top 160 William Goldman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

— William Goldman

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sarcastic Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Hurt Quotes

2. “Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

— William Goldman

3. “Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.”

— William Goldman

4. “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

— William Goldman

5. “Life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”

— William Goldman

6. “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. If this is true, or if you are one of the people who believe this is true, then the one universal way to enjoy life is still the same, which is to learn to be grateful that it is not worse!!”

— William Goldman

7. “Love is many things none of them logical.”

— William Goldman

8. “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.”

— William Goldman

9. “Have fun storming the castle!”

— William Goldman

10. “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!”

— William Goldman

11. “Who says life is fair, where is that written?”

— William Goldman

12. “Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.”

— William Goldman

13. “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

— William Goldman

14. “You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.”

— William Goldman

15. “Get used to disappointment.”

— William Goldman

16. “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”

— William Goldman

17. “When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don’t count-I mean something with print in it.”

— William Goldman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “In Hollywood, no one knows anything.”

— William Goldman

19. “Let’s look on the bright side: we’re having an adventure, Fezzik, and most people live and die without being as lucky as we are.”

— William Goldman

20. “It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy, even the normal ones are weird.”

— William Goldman

21. “Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.”

— William Goldman

22. “A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite.”

— William Goldman

23. “Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.”

— William Goldman

24. “I don’t guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.”

— William Goldman

25. “Life isn’t fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it’s a terrible thing to do. It’s not only a lie, it’s a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it’s never going to be.”

— William Goldman

26. “The Princess Bride S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it.”

— William Goldman

27. “I’m not witch. I’m your wife.”

— William Goldman

28. “Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam. The dweam of wuv wapped wiffin the gweater dweam of everwasting west. Eternity is our fwiend, wemember that, and wuv wiw fowwow you fowever.”

— William Goldman

29. “Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.”

— William Goldman

30. “The only way forward is to never look back.”

— William Goldman

31. “One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.”

— William Goldman

32. “Well, why didn’t you list that among our assets in the first place?”

— William Goldman

33. “True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.”

— William Goldman

34. “Just because you’re beautiful and perfect, it’s made you conceited.”

— William Goldman

35. “I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I LOVE YOU. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I.”

— William Goldman

36. “I’ll tell you the truth and its up to you to live with it.”

— William Goldman

37. “People don’t remember me. Really. It’s not a paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn’t bother me all that much, except I guess that’s a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.”

— William Goldman

38. “The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.”

— William Goldman

Featured in: Strong Quotes

39. “Jelenka Harvey Harcourt Trade Publishers 15 East 26th Street New York, NY 10010.”

— William Goldman

40. “But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid – that had to mean something.”

— William Goldman

41. “When this is over we will see who is right, and who is dead.”

— William Goldman

42. “I’ve been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn’t listen. Every time you said ‘Farm Boy do this’ you thought I was answering ‘As you wish’ but that’s only because you were hearing wrong. ‘I love you’ was what it was, but you never heard.”

— William Goldman

43. “Truth is terrific, reality is even better, but believability is the best of all.”

— William Goldman

44. “Dummy, dummy, go out now and fill your tummy.”

— William Goldman

45. “You mean you’ll put down your rock and I’ll put down my sword and we’ll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that.”

— William Goldman

46. “Inigo Montoya: He’s right on top of us. I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.”

— William Goldman

47. “The enemy is always in the mind.”

— William Goldman

48. “Enough about my beauty,” Buttercup said. “Everybody always talks about how beautiful I am. I’ve got a mind, Westley. Talk about that.”

— William Goldman

49. “Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting.”

— William Goldman

50. “The boys. The beef-witted featherbrained rattleskulled clod-pated dim-domed noodle-noggined sapheaded lunk-knobbed boys. How could anybody accuse her of stealing them? Why would anybody want them anyway?”

— William Goldman