Hollywood Writing Quotes & Sayings

What will you do?"
"Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie."
"What are you going to call it?"
"Hollywood."
"Hollywood?"
"Yes ... — Charles Bukowski

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood. — Jenna Fischer

Writing turns everybody into wussies. Everybody quits. — Paul T. Scheuring

In Hollywood, story content of movies follows a hierarchy of power, not the relative quality of various ideas. Hollywood does not lack for quality writing. It's just that quality writing commonly has to be sacrificed in order to propel a film into production. A studio needs a star and a director to make a film, so those are the folk who'll define the content. If they don't have the same creative sensibilities, then the content will change. — Terry Rossio

Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means. — Joan Didion

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels. — Mylo Carbia

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood. — Michael Pena

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically. — Noah Hawley

As a writer, you're the guy in the box. You're creating and you have these euphorias. — Paul T. Scheuring

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good. — Raymond Chandler

There's a story you write, there's a story you shoot and there's a story you cut. — Paul T. Scheuring

It's more believable that a cop would get involved in solving these murders. I mean, you're talking about writing a series. How believable is it that this Hollywood gossip columnist is going to keep stumbling on all these murders? — Josh Lanyon

During my career as a standup and actor, I realized it was very frustrating for me to get hired because Hollywood was hiring a different kind of brother, you know, and I was doing political humor. In order for me to really have a long career, I'm going to have to learn how to write and produce for myself. I had no idea I was really going to like it and I'm very fortunate to be successful. But the idea was to always eventually create something for myself. That was the idea from the beginning when I went into writing and producing. — Larry Wilmore

Any topical subject, if it's Hollywood, will be a couple of years later because you've got to write it, produce it and distribute it, so automatically you're never going to be right on the cutting edge of stories. — George Clooney

I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home. — Michel Hazanavicius

When I get called in for stuff for Hollywood, I get to be the best friend of the Caucasian leadIf I want to play the main guy, I have found, I have to write it. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

I met Jon Lovett, who was just coming off of three years of being a presidential speech writer and had just arrived here to be a comedy writer in Hollywood. I thought he was super green, in terms of this world, but he knows so much about the world that we're attempting to write about. — Josh Gad

Really I'm just an actor. The only difference between me and those cats in Hollywood is that I write my own script. — Jimi Hendrix

I've always been sort of entrepreneurial ... I felt that I needed to learn how to write and produce so I could write my own thing and not worry about Hollywood finding me. — Larry Wilmore

With prose, I know where I'm starting and I think I know where I'm going. — Paul T. Scheuring

I couldn't hack it in Hollywood, my writing's wasn't bad enough. — Russ Lippitt

I don't know why the publishers in New York don't take a tip from Hollywood and just publish the outlines of novels rather than the completed books. Let the audience use their imaginations, as my Maw always says about radio. I would much prefer to read an outline of War and Peace than slog through eight hundred thousand words. Why do I need Tolstoy to describe snow? I can imagine snow, whether Russian snow or just regular snow. But book publishers seem to think that the authors should do all the work, and the readers should be waited on hand-and-foot like a buncha goddamn prima donnas. — Gary Reilly

For me, if Shakespeare was around today, he'd be writing screenplays - a big Hollywood movie. — Douglas Booth

I didn't leave that crowd of ocelots to go back into it." [when asked to write the film script for The Osterman Weekend] — Robert Ludlum

It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind. — Naveen Andrews

Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did. — Rita Mae Brown

I don't really go out and do too much like networking and Hollywood events kind of thing. But I do some writing, and I find it helps me as an actor in terms of giving yourself back the power and feeling a bit of strength in that respect. — Scottie Thompson

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career. — Nora Ephron

It's a fact, the majority of films in Hollywood are from the male perspective. And the female characters, very rarely do they get to speak to another female character in a movie, and when they do it's usually about a guy, not anything else. So they're very male-centric, Hollywood films, in general. So I think it's incredible that Ned Benson, when I said I'd love to know where she goes, says okay, I'm going to write another film from the female perspective. — Jessica Chastain

Hollywood is just so strange. It's like, everyone has a whole bunch of stuff boiling away and whichever one happens first, happens. That one, we're still in the process of, you know, trying to write the script. So, it's still very early stages at this point. Yeah. — James Wan

Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business. — Vince Gilligan

I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire. — Stephen Gaghan

I'd been in Hollywood for five years before I started writing 'The Guild.' I worked enough to pay all my bills. So I was very lucky in that respect. Most people don't make a living acting. — Felicia Day

Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a half of a credit on maybe one movie, or none. So they're all theoretical. — Thomas Lennon

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films. — Khaled Hosseini

I mean, sitcoms shouldn't be doing 'Saturday Night Live.' You can't just do bit after bit after bit. You have to string it together with tight writing and performances. Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to do this. — Joyce DeWitt

When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, "OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?" — Mitch Hedberg

I hear Jerry Falwell every Sunday here talking about the devil and Hollywood ... I'm gonna write him a letter. Hollywood wasn't built on filth and dirt - it was built on talent. — Mickey Rooney

If it isn't for the writing, we've got nothing. Writers are the most important people in Hollywood. And we must never let them know it. — Irving Thalberg

It's when you feel worse, that's when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit. — Paul T. Scheuring

Remember this: a simple pen is much more swift and much more precise than a camera. That's my advice to both beginning and experienced authors: don't write with a camera. A camera is slow. All these modern writers usually make the same mistake - they write books with a film in mind. When you read their works, you don't hear the voice of a real author, you hear that horribly cheesy Hollywood voice-over. Frankly, that's not a novel, it's a movie script. If you write books, use a pen. A pen is swift, it has tempo, you can kill people with it. You cannot kill people with a camera, you can only perhaps bore them to death with it. — Martijn Benders

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing. — Will Rogers

I was very young, maybe five. The opera was very ... I was attracted to opera to the point that I think it's the reason I started to write music for films. I never studied. There are film and music school that teach you how to write music. I never studied that. But the influence of opera, which is a combination of storyline, visuals, staging, plus music ... that was perhaps the best school I could have had. That's what gave me the idea of coming to Hollywood to write music for films. — Lalo Schifrin

I was never ambitious. I just wanted to have quiet, calm, listen to public radio and say, hello, how are you? Sit down, rest. But I had an early partner named Fred Freeman, a wonderful writer who I met at Northwestern. And I thought we were doing very well with "Jack Paar," and he said, no, we got to go to Hollywood. We got to write sitcom. It's the coming thing. — Garry Marshall

There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as an honorable career, or with his excess of ego about calling himself a writer. — Paul Engle

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it ... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties ... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine. — Clive Barker

Writing for a soap - writing for 25 characters day in, day out - is one of the most difficult jobs in Hollywood. — Eric Braeden

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about. — Truman Capote

It's a great euphoria when you reach that writing zone. — Paul T. Scheuring

It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream. — Nathan Fillion

The Hollywood process is a living thing and you get used to that. — Paul T. Scheuring

He convinced me - Fred Freeman - to go to Hollywood and we went to Hollywood to write sitcoms. Joey Bishop actually paid my way to Hollywood. — Garry Marshall

I always liked movies, so I started writing for Hollywood, but my day job was physics. — Leonard Mlodinow

Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I'll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11-year-old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can't take him to? They've done something wrong. — Greg Rucka

I really like writing heroes who aren't necessarily 'Hollywood handsome.' Personally, I think men who are self-confident, intelligent, and funny are outrageously attractive - and my heroines tend to think that, too! — Suzanne Brockmann

In Hollywood, no one knows anything. — William Goldman