Quotes About Screenwriting

A trap screenwriters can fall into is making scripts that are good reads, which doesn't necessarily mean it will make a good film.

The thing about being a screenwriter, scriptwriter, or scenarist, You get to have multiple personalities and not be charged!

Working at Pixar has been like my graduate school for screenwriting.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We've seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon.

Screenwriting is made of brevity.

I was done with music and I became very cynical about the industry and Top 40 radio. I didn't even want to look at music for a while, and did a course in screen-writing.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

If you want to be a screenwriter, take an acting class to get a sense of what you're asking actors to do. Learning other skills will help you communicate with people and respect what they do.

I was about 14 when I started with a theater group; it was like a stage group on the weekends alongside school. And it was run by a group of guys who'd been to drama school themselves in London. So they introduced us to techniques that they'd learn about, and they kind of informed us about improvisation and screenwriting and all of that stuff.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.

I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

I've been doing a bit of screenwriting and producing, and even a bit of directing.

For me, directing a film is like confining myself. I want to do something beyond direction. I can conceive stories, write screenplays, etc. That's better for me.

People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.

Aristotle wrote The Poetics, the "secrets" of story have been as public as the library down the street. Nothing in the craft of storytelling is abstruse. In fact, at first glance telling story for the screen looks deceptively easy. But moving closer and closer to the center, trying scene by scene to make the story work, the task becomes increasingly difficult, as we realize that on the screen there's no place to hide.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.