Top 44 Best Screenplay Quotes
#1. Everyone thinks that 'Chinatown' is the best screenplay. I'm not sure it is.
Patricia Marx
#2. I present the nominees, well, not me the Voice of God, for Best Screenplay.
Emma Thompson
#3. I would like Albert Brooks to have received the Oscars for best actor, best director and best screenplay for 'Modern Romance.' I love that movie.
Andy Kindler
#4. I've done some stuff with Thomas Jane and Tim Bradstreet in the comic world and it was interesting to me how close to a screenplay a comic can be. Certainly a four issue comic can be a four act structured screenplay and so I would totally be for that.
Todd Farmer
#5. I think longer that you sit on a screenplay the longer you sit. I'm a firm believer that you can write the magic out of a movie, out of a screenplay. I'm not saying that the first draft is always the best draft but a lot of times the magic is in the first couple of drafts. T
Todd Farmer
#6. A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.
Deborah Moggach
#7. A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character.
Jose Padilha
#8. Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#9. I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.
Christy Hall
#10. 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won't take a movie that's not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.
Alfonso Cuaron
#11. Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass - it's all showbiz!
Guy Maddin
#12. If I know what my finale is when I'm writing a screenplay, then I don't always have to chart out every scene before that. I can adequately find my way. I'm experienced enough to do that.
David Twohy
#13. 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
#14. I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking.
Kerry Washington
#15. With the right tools, you can write anything ...
Jeff Lyons
#16. I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
Rupert Sanders
#17. 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
#18. Movies are not the book. Movies are not even the screenplay. They are the movie.
Bruce Joel Rubin
#19. No false promises are made that if you read these pages, you will learn the formula for writing a million-dollar screenplay; in fact, the dirty little secret of screenwriting books is that anyone who promises such formulas is lying. There
Peter Hanson
#20. Have you ever experienced a beauty of soul, an esthetic grace, that was so intense it made you want to cry?
From Central Park Song ( A Screenplay )
Zack Love
#21. A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.
David Nicholls
#22. A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.
Nicholas Meyer
#23. If you play it straight it's funny - the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.
Tom Hiddleston
#24. Scripts are what matter. If you get the foundations right and then you get the right ingredients on top, you stand a shot ... but if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don't stand a shot. It's very rare-almost never-that a good film gets made from a bad screenplay.
Tim Bevan
#25. I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#26. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.
David Benioff
#28. A screenplay is really a blueprint for something that will be filmed. Therefore you must always keep in mind that whatever you write is going to be staged, for real.
D.J. MacHale
#29. When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#30. The screenplay is so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it - the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'
Roger Ebert
#31. I really just love to open a blank document and spew, whereas with a screenplay I have to be more judicious.
Diablo Cody
#32. Some directors, like Stevens [George Stevens], shoot full circle, 360 degrees, and that's what's right for them. I generally shoot at about a seven to one ratio. But part of that is because I've worked on every screenplay, so I'm further along in the visual concept.
Elia Kazan
#33. I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.
Patrick Wang
#34. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.
Quentin Tarantino
#35. Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful.
Gerard De Marigny
#36. Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.
Griffin Dunne
#37. Why does Kubrick always chill our blood, and make us huddled up scared stiff with eyes wide shut? Because even dead he's still "Shinnying" with his old hand and his eye-catching plots.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#38. As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.
Hugo Weaving
#40. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.
Sara Sheridan
#41. [Success] always starts with the material; it always starts with the truth and honesty of the characters that you read in the screenplay and that's rarely something that can be remedied if it's simply not there by the time you shoot the film. Thank God we had that.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#42. With 'Moreau,' it's been particularly confusing because I started out being the writer of the screenplay and then trying to be the director, then being moved from being the director and having to become the dog extra, it makes some kind of sense to suddenly become a character in the story.
Richard Stanley
#43. When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.
Stanley Tucci
#44. I sold my first screenplay six months before 'Glee,' but they had the option for a year and now it's back with me.
Dianna Agron
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