Quotes & Sayings About Writing Scripts

that material presents 'testing'
as: "start spending 100% of my time on the project, formally
writing a test strategy, approach, and plan, and writing
test cases and scripts which are cross referenced to the
requirements, even though the requirements are changing
and therefore much of the 'testing' would lead to waste and
rework — Alan Richardson

There are people I'm drawn to that you just can't do a tiny, no-budget movie with. I would like to pursue some of that stuff, to see if I could do a movie with some of those people. And I don't really write scripts myself, but if I read a script I thought was really great, I would totally be up for doing a more traditional movie. It's just that I don't exist in that world.
right now. — Joe Swanberg

To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up? — Chinua Achebe

I learned that you really don't have any control as a writer. Waah, waah, waah. Big deal. Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control. As someone who's just writing scripts, you just kind of have to shrug. I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general. It is what it is. — Bret Easton Ellis

And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene. — Quentin Tarantino

Comic scripts are full-on collaborations, not only with your artist, but your editors and colorists and letterers and PR folks, etc. Writing comics reminds me of my days as a journalist, working on a staff of fun, smart people. — Duane Swierczynski

You're there right through the match, thinking all the time, making it up as you go along. We don't have anybody write our scripts. You're basically presenting to the people watching at home off the top of your head. — Jill Douglas

I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer. — William Monahan

I get a lot of 'Oh, you've been gone.' I wasn't gone. Just because you didn't see me doesn't mean I wasn't working and collecting checks. I just wasn't singing and doing videos. I do a lot of other things, like I said, like writing scripts and stuff like that. I write for other artists. — Tionne Watkins

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down. — Gurinder Chadha

As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college. — Damien Chazelle

When I retired, I was at an in-between age. I wasn't a child anymore, I wasn't really a woman yet, and they weren't really writing scripts for that age. — Mary Badham

I'm a highly, highly, highly creative human being. I write music all the time. I write scripts constantly. I run my own production company. I'm also a very determined businesswoman. I've a town to deal with. I've got a lot of things to do and I don't have time to be classified as difficult, and I don't have time to care. — Kim Basinger

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script. — William Monahan

I don't look at scripts. I just write them. — James Cameron

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once. — James Gleick

As a director who does not like to write, I am always looking for scripts that I can contribute to through directing. I don't want to do the same thing that the writer is doing; I want to add an angle or highlight a theme. — Jen McGowan

All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process. — Tom Stoppard

Hundreds of people who've never written before send in 'Dr. Who' scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is. — Douglas Adams

We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age. — Viola Davis

I did theater for a few years while I was in New York, but it was tough having to perform scripts worse than what I knew I could write. — Zach Braff

I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically. — W.C. Fields

The ideal time for writing a [television] script is four days, though sometimes it has to be two or three days depending on the deadline. If it's two days, sometimes there are things I see that don't work as well. If I have two weeks, the scripts get kind of flabby and lack the adrenaline that a sense of deadline fills you with. — David E. Kelley

I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years. — Geoffrey S. Fletcher

When I get a script and do my work, and then show up on set and work, it's the same zone that I'm in when I'm in front of a canvas, or when I'm writing a story about one of my paintings, or when I'm playing music. Whatever I'm doing at any given time, it's the same exact zone. — Michael Marisi Ornstein

I have been writing my whole life: stories and plays and sketches and scripts and poems and jokes. Most feel alive. And fluid. Breathing organisms made better by the people who come into contact with them. But this book has nearly killed me. Because, you see, a book? A book has a cover. They call it a jacket and that jacket keeps the inside warm so that the words stay permanent and everyone can read your genius thoughts over and over again for years to come. Once a book is published it can't be changed, which is a stressful proposition for this improviser who relies on her charm. I've been told that I am "better in the room" and "prettier in person." Both these things are not helpful when writing a book. I am looking forward to a lively book-on-tape session with the hope that Kathleen Turner agrees to play me when I talk about some of my darker periods. One can dream. — Amy Poehler

He pointed to the board where the word 'alliteration' had been written in handwriting far better than mine, which on good days looks like it came from the hand of a blind doctor writing his own morphine scripts in an earthquake. — Robert Wilder

For years I've wanted to work with this guy, so to actually write at the top of my scripts "Empress, Script by Mark Millar, Art by Stuart Immonen" is an absolute pleasure. — Mark Millar

Most scripts are written to be green lit. They're not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don't write for actors. They don't understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B. — Laura Linney

I wrote lots of scripts that never got made and they were terrible. I thought they were good at the time. You can't write two scripts and expect your career to take off. Keep writing. Be you. Be original. A lot of people go for a genre, which is fine if you can do that really well, but we all have such layered histories. We all come from a unique background. Write about your past, write about you. Or make stuff up, but make it about something that really matters. — Nicole Holofcener

Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. — Shane Black

In fact you can begin to discover and investigate whether you are an actor or not, whether you're in my view, qualified for a life in this profession or in this endeavor by checking yourself out and acting every day, getting plays and scripts and getting together with people and divvying up the parts and acting in one way or another, or writing things. — Jeff Goldblum

I drank in his smell, I'd missed him so much more than I'd realised. Despite dreaming of him every night, besides my secret habit of writing Honour Hussain in curled scripts on every scrap piece of paper, I surprised myself by how much I needed him. — Ruth Ahmed

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

I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. — Gina Prince-Bythewood

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making. — Judd Apatow

When I'm not acting, I'm writing, building an inventory of scripts. Even if they sit on the shelf, I just keep stacking them up. — Dan Aykroyd

Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've something to say when I've thought of a person, a moment, a single beat of the heart, that I think is true and interesting, and therefore should be seen. — Russell T. Davies

If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a show. Then the director takes that and hires people. It's like trying to build a house without any bricks. You need the script. I could build the house, but I have to know how. — John Patrick Shanley

'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases. — Michael Mann

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

Oh, I had an idea for a pilot of my own at the time, and then Carl sent me about eight scripts and simply I threw my idea out the window because the writing was just so good. — Dick Van Dyke

I started writing my original scripts replete with kings and queens who lived in the cities and did not want their children to marry servants. They had enough money to throw around and their lives never ended well. — S.A. David

I have, for a few years, been writing comedy prose - short pieces for my blog - because I found it to be a good way to write while I was on a TV show. It was different enough from my scripts that it felt like a break, but it still was comedy and very fun. I like to do comedy! — Megan Amram

Take a favorite trick of yours and write a 'gestures script' how could you improve clarity [using gestures]. — Roberto Giobbi

Always care for the writing part first. Every good film project starts with good writing. If you have a good script, everything else follows. Writing is crucial. — Giovanna Cau

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story. — Rod Serling

When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts. — Aaron Sorkin

I think there's something strange about writing a script I've written many, many scripts - dozens and dozens of scripts - and every time I start one, I think to myself: 'why in the world do I think I know how to do this?' — Brian Helgeland

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium. — Bret Easton Ellis

It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't. — Geoffrey S. Fletcher

The summer gig turned into my day job. I was an arts administrator who helped make indie flicks. At the filmmakers' encouragement, I tried shooting a couple of shorts of my own. Directing was stressful, it was not my strength. But writing the scripts and helping others with their scripts - that was a gas. Making stuff up the way I wanted to see it was the biggest kick I ever experienced. — Karen Walton

I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that. — Justin Theroux

I don't think the written word is important in movies anymore and the really great movies are done by great directors who in many cases write their own scripts. I think it's gotten to be more of a visual thing than an audible thing. — Anita Loos

In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing. — Josh Radnor

I don't like to write any music to a script. Experience has taught me that's generally a waste of time. — Cliff Martinez

I was just interested in directing. So I just kept having a go at trying to write little scripts and get things together, and my wife just had a slip of the tongue and said, "Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life" when she meant to say "Frank Capra's." There it is right there. That's a gag that we could make into something. — Peter Capaldi

You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then. — Chuck D

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight. — Aaron Sorkin

I have enjoyed writing my own stuff, and it's been a privilege to be able to scrap some money together to be able to make films from my own scripts. — Lisa Cholodenko

I spent as much time writing proposals in '98 and '99 as I did writing scripts. — Mark Millar

I've written so many things over the years that I don't want to go back to being just a scriptwriter. I'm in what I consider to be the enviable position of all I have to do is come up with the idea and write an outline that makes it seem like it's a viable idea that will interest people, and then other people write the scripts
and I become the executive producer or the producer, depending on how much involvement I have, and I get a creative credit and then move on to the next project. — Stan Lee

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book. — Hilary Duff

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

I write scripts by myself. It's not for everybody. It's someone's personal work. I need to be in love with the subject. — Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Years later, (Paul) Jones described the mental gymnastics that went into writing these scripts. "Every evening I would close my eyes in a quiet place in my apartment ... I would visualize the opening and walk myself through the day and imagine the different emotional states the market would go through... Then when you get there, you are ready for it. You have been there before. You are in a mental state to take advantage of emotional extremes because you have already lived through them. — Sebastian Mallaby

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels. — Jasper Fforde

Yeah, the main goal when I'm writing [movie scripts] is to entertain myself. It's supposed to be funny, but then a funny idea can be turned into something else. — Quentin Dupieux

Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately. — Peter Dinklage

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:

Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
— John DeFrancis

Writing is a hard gig, and it's hard to convey a lot. That's why scripts tend to be a little bit overwritten. — Mel Gibson

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 figured I'd probably write 50 scripts in my life. Out of those 50, I figured maybe five would be produced, and that maybe one or two would be successful. So I always kind of expected I'd write at least one successful film in my life. [ ... ] The way it all came together was kind of like Murphy's law in reverse - I don't expect that kind of experience again any time soon. — Michael Arndt

I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts. — Jesse Eisenberg

My personal experience has been that in my 25 years of writing, I have not been asked to do more than four or five commercial one-shot scripts. These were performed on major national hook-ups but produced for me no immediate additional jobs or requests. One script for BBC was done around the world with an all-star cast. — Langston Hughes

In the end, whether I write the script or, in this case, somebody else did, there's a point where you let it go when you're making a movie. You just have to. The thing that you shoot is not what you imagined in your head - it never is exactly that. And it shouldn't be. — Todd Haynes

When I write my scripts, there's a point at which if I'm not starting to see them visually, I feel like I'm kind of cheating. So my scripts are laden with a lot of visual description, which makes them not so much fun to read - I kind of weigh them down. — Todd Haynes

Most of the time I've worked with directors who write their own scripts. The story is more important to me than the part. The project of the film has always been more important to me. — Catherine Deneuve

My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood. — Rani Mukerji

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script. — John Taylor Gatto

I've sold scripts in the past, and also a TV pilot that didn't get made, to Fox. But yeah, I've been writing for a while. — Michael Jai White

[Writing scripts] I'm not looking to jump in and make super mainstream movies. I still like to make movies that I like to see. — Rob Zombie

Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing. — Andy Garcia

I was opposed to doing TV for a long time because I thought the quality of writing wasn't very strong, as opposed to film, but there's been a shift in term of the quality of scripts. HBO has attracted a tremendous amount of great writing talent. — Peter Dinklage

We've done things that are faster at times, but it's definitely different when we direct all the episodes because it's like we have to write them all, then shoot them all, then edit them all. So we have to just get ahead on those scripts basically. — Mark Duplass

When you finish writing the scripts they have time to take a breath and think about everything. There's just a little more time to think. Network does not allow for that. — Alex Graves

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat. — Peter Jackson

Lots of things are hard work, but I think writing, for me, after I started acting at 13 years old. I like writing now much more than I do acting only because, well, partly because the scripts that are offered are junk. — Gene Wilder

Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in. — David Twohy

The one affectation I have forced on the publisher ... are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter. — Andy Rooney

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something. — Neil Gaiman

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun. — Chris Lilley

Let's make movies, not deals. Let's write movies, not scripts. — Paula Wagner

I never had a movie that I wanted to do turned down in my whole life. I always write the script first so it speaks for itself. — Steve Martin

Pilot scripts are particularly difficult to write because you have to introduce all the characters without it feeling like a series of introductions. — Tina Fey

I'm an impatient guy and tend not to like to stay with one thing for a long time. I'll never be able to write as many scripts as I did for "Felicity" or "Alias" ever again. I'm just too impatient these days. I want to get on to the next project. — J.J. Abrams

I don't think there's anything that I would really baulk at doing on-screen. I don't think so. I've got certain pet peeves about writing ... my pet peeve about reading scripts is when they give you a line reading and there'll be a line but next to your character's name it'll say 'very angry'. But I'm like: "Well, I'll decide that actually!" So, there's little things like that. That's a slight pet peeve. — Daniel Radcliffe

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them. — Nic Pizzolatto

To sit down at a computer every day and write a script is commendable. I don't have the patience for it, but I have some fantastic ideas. — Shiloh Fernandez

With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right. And consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and got to "Kill Bill" volume 1 and 2. — Quentin Tarantino