Quotes & Sayings About Writing Screenplays

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another. — Steve Martin

I'm currently writing a screenplay that I haven't started yet. — Serena Williams

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade. — Cary Fukunaga

You write a screenplay and then everybody is going to want to get in on it and we have to figure that out. I've written three screenplays that are at studios and I still haven't been making them yet so there is always something that is either going to trip something up or maybe get another pass. — Craig Brewer

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once. — Jess Walter

Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write. — Ray Bradbury

Writing screenplays is incredibly hard. I can't call it joy. Writing Novels? Joy. Directing? Joy. Writing Screenplays? That's where you pay all your dues. — Stephen Chbosky

I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance. — Meghan Daum

I have a couple screenplays that are done, and I'm looking for the right people to help me make them. I do a lot of television writing to develop new ideas for shows. — Jimmi Simpson

I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. — Rebecca Miller

I'm very keen. Adaptations of other people's work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that'd be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it's become one of my favorite genres. — Emma Donoghue

Most of the ideas I've gotten for novels or screenplays have occurred to me while I was either shaving or taking a bath. A number have occurred to me while I was driving 127. I rarely get ideas when seated in front of my typewriter, which I find ironic because I have always suspected that typing somehow plays a key role in writing. — Gary Reilly

I definitely want to do more movies, and I'm also a writer, so I have a few screenplays that I'm working on, one of them based off my one-woman show that I used to do in New York. Two of the screenplays I've written by myself, and then I'm also working on one with my writing partner, Tom Riley, who's in London. — Eliza Coupe

Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful. — Gerard De Marigny

The idea of directing was something that I always had in the back of my mind, and writing as well. I began to write screenplays when I was in my 20's. — Charles Martin Smith

I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now. — Diablo Cody

I have completed and uncompleted screenplays, but they both fall into the category of "unsold." I've seen quite a few movies where the screenplays seemed to be in the "uncompleted" category yet still got sold and made into movies, so I generally refer too all screenplays as "sold" or "unsold." But that's just my own filing system. — Gary Reilly

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well. — Blake Jenner

I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays. — Gia Coppola

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason. — Chris Wooding

Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru! — Jeff Lyons

Makebelieve is a writer's best friend. — Solange Nicole

In Hollywood, no one knows anything. — William Goldman

Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they're going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, 'Why am I out there looking for directors?' - because you look at a list of directors, it's all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, 'I'm just gonna become a director and that'll make it easier.' — Nora Ephron

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

There is magic in the old and magic in the new; the trick is to successfully combine the two. — A.D. Posey

When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written. — William Monahan

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. — Jonathan Tropper

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing — Douglas Adams

When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios. — Sasha Alexander

I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen. — William Gibson

I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays. — Leonard Mlodinow

Screenplays are structure, and that's all they are. The quality of writing - which is crucial in almost every other form of literature - is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn't anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don't want to begin with "Once upon a time," because the audience gets antsy. — William Goldman

I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing. — Peter Landesman

Stand-up life is really hard. At one point, I got so paralyzed I could write five screenplays before I could write three jokes for stand-up. Later, I've finally allowed myself to relax quite a bit, to think I can do it because I've done it in the past. The pressure to come up with the material is the same but the anxiety about whether I can do it is gone. — Steve Martin

I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it. — Emily Mortimer

I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made. — Joe R. Lansdale

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page. — Quentin Tarantino

Novelist by day; screenwriter by night. — A.D. Posey

There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive.
Someone has to survive — Chris Dietzel

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays. — Sherman Alexie

If you have a good script, that's what gets you involved. It's harder to write a good screenplay than to find something. — Bill Murray

I write mostly as a director. That's why my screenplays are very detailed. So I get into the images I see. I like that. — Deepa Mehta

I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I'm in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It's a very freeing thing. — Daniel Clowes

Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write. — Dolph Lundgren

He took me from not being able to write a word in terms of writing screenplays to being the king of wooden dialogue. — George Lucas

But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away. — Bret Easton Ellis

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me. — Emma Thompson

With the right tools, you can write anything ... — Jeff Lyons

When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They'd be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I'd get. — Bill Hader

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive. — Ridley Scott

When I moved out to Los Angeles to get some film and television work, and couldn't get any ... I became a little isolated, a little terrified, and it's a good place to get writing, because you're so bored. So I wrote a few screenplays, and people notice those. — Clark Gregg

Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on. — Daniel Clowes

Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can. — Nick Cave

I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together. — John Niven

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it. — Quentin Tarantino

So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all. — Guillermo Del Toro

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels. — Quentin Tarantino

Suddenly I was writing a lot of screenplays, and I was no long in New York, so I stopped acting in plays, and it just became too tricky to find a part to play, either in a play or a film that coincided with my schedule writing and or directing. — Michael Cristofer

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet. — Rose Tremain

There are many self-proclaimed "screenwriting gurus" - though how you get to be a "guru" of something you've never actually done is beyond us. Screenplays are like blueprints. A guy who's drawn up a lot of blueprints that have never actually been made into buildings is not an "architecture guru," he's an "unemployed douchebag." A guy who talks about screen-writing but who's never sold a screenplay is not a "screenwriting guru," he's a "lecture circuit bullshit artist." From now on, that's what we'll call them. — Thomas Lennon

I'm completely surrounded, not only my father, but also my three brothers, and Sergio, my husband, all four of them work in film. Some are writers, or directors, or cinematographers, all of them. I'm surrounded by men that make films, so much that at some point I felt there was no more room in the family for another filmmaker.For many years I was only working as novelist or writing screenplays for others to direct. — Lucia Puenzo

The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel. — Nicholas Sparks

When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen. — Taiye Selasi

The way you write dialogue is the same whether you're writing for movies or TV or games. We use movie scriptwriting software to write the screenplays for our games, but naturally we have things in the script that you would never have in a movie script
different branches and optional dialogue, for example. But still, when it comes to storytelling and dialogue, they are very much the same. — Sam Lake

Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue. — Elmore Leonard

I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing. — Peter Landesman