Screenplay Writing Quotes

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think. ~ Christopher Darden

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

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting. ~ Robert Altman

Well, I kind of approach both of them similarly in (that) I always see it as a movie first because that's my background. Cindy Kelley, who has been my writing partner on my novels, she works more on the prose side and the description side of the storytelling because, obviously, there's a lot more of that in a novel than in a screenplay. You only have up to 120 pages in a screenplay. ~ Michael Landon, Jr.

There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise. ~ Robert McKee

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Most of screenplay writing is deciding which voices you want to listen to and take on board. ~ Abi Morgan

Anyone living in Los Angeles who has opposable thumbs is required to write a screenplay. ~ James Scott Bell

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay. ~ Shane Carruth

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

Writing is busy idleness. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I feel like I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, But I've kept pretty stable. That's because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion as long as it's only a song. It works for me, and I don't want to change it. I don't have anything left for writing. ~ Jennifer Echols

The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

I want to write something that makes it easy for young people to look right into the abyss. ~ Dave Mustaine

I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition. ~ William Monahan

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style. ~ Ishmael Reed

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt. ~ Grace Cavalieri

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved - I suppose - deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing. ~ Joan Didion

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young. ~ Dennis Potter

But a man cannot by writing a bill of divorce to his vice get rid of all trouble at once, and enjoy tranquillity by living apart. ~ Plutarch

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play. ~ Aaron Sorkin

Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing. ~ Anne Tyler

Don't write slogans, write truths. ~ Joe Strummer

There's no better teacher for writing than reading ... Get a library card. That's the best investment. ~ Alisa Valdes

My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting. ~ Daniel Clowes

Writing leads to intimate surges of the mind and seizures of consciousness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The real power of this book comes from its documentation from major sources. In fact, you will quickly discover that most of my documents about Jewish Supremacism are from Jewish sources. They argue more convincingly for my point of view than anything I could write. I encourage you to go to the sources that I quote and check them out for yourself. In this book I take you along with me on a fascinating journey of discovery in a forbidden subject. I urge you to courageously keep an open mind while you explore the topics ahead, for that is the only way any of us can find the truth. ~ David Duke

I think I'd been limiting myself in some ways just writing in first person all the time. ~ Adam Duritz

As Mazzini put it, writing in 1849: 'The masters of the world had united against the future.' But they had also left a poisoned chalice no less toxic than the acqua tofana whose menace exerted such a spell. When the future caught up with them, in 1917-18, it detonated a series of events which would cost the lives of untold millions and lead to the near-destruction of European civilization. ~ Adam Zamoyski

Writing for young readers is almost like dipping into a fountain of youth; for hours a day, I am a child again. ~ Iain Lawrence

Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime. ~ Corra May Harris

Mostly I'm writing about people, so I feel constrained to take with me my view of people, my curiosity about how people choose the things they do and why they come to certain decisions in a certain fashion and all the things that drive most writers. ~ Raymond E. Feist

I put some nice thick socks and my Alpine slippers and then curled up in a chair by the fire to read The Beautiful and Damned. 'Fitzgerald's a poet', Shakespear had said when she recommended it, [ ... ]. The writing was exquisite, I had to admit, but it was making me sad to read about Gloria and Anthony. They talked prettily and had nice things, but their lives were hollow. I didn't have the stomach for such a dire picture of marriage, not just now. ~ Paula McLain

As we travel to new places we gain new perspectives and renew our thinking. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All good storytellers study psychology ... Novelists, filmmakers, even actors. You have to know the rules of human behavior before you can make your characters break them. ~ Katharine McGee

To vest a few fallible men - prosecutors, judges, jurors - with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products ... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries ... ~ Jerome Frank

I like to write and draw everything with sharpies. I even got one with my own name on it! ~ Alexander Wang

The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay. ~ Terry Teachout

If you can't be the poet, be the poem. ~ David Carradine

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else. ~ Cary Grant