Movie Screenplay Quotes

#1. I was originally casted to be in the Superman movie but I read the script and realized that it was mysteriously similar to my screenplay for Zach Braff the Movie.

Zach Braff

#2. Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don't sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don't have to worry about that.

Stephen Chbosky

#3. Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

Joe Shuster

#4. 'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.

Bel Powley

#5. Beneath every cynic there's a frustrated romantic.

Peter Bishop

#6. If you manage a situation, not just things happening there, people should feel elevated just being in that space. Above all, you must feel wonderful being there.

Jaggi Vasudev

#7. When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

John Patrick Shanley

#8. The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

Salman Rushdie

#9. I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.

Ingrid Bergman

#10. A movie is painting, it's photography, it's literature - because you have to have the screenplay - it's music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it's a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.

Paula Patton

#11. Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror up to where you're bravely working.

Rumi

#12. I talk about going to [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying
when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to
wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water' ... the failure of
my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.

Sarah Vowell

#13. The truth is, after Boys Don't Cry, I realized how few and far between the great roles are. I am beyond thankful for finding Million Dollar Baby.

Hilary Swank

#14. I've wanted to make a film about French youth since I went to Cannes with my first film 'Kids' in 1995 ... Scribe's screenplay is about French kids today, and the world today. Just like my films 'Kids' and 'Ken Park', this will be a movie like you have never seen before.

Larry Clark

#15. If you think the anima as being "nothing but" what you know about her, you have not the receptiveness of a listening attitude, and so she becomes "nothing but" a load of brutal emotions; you have never given her a chance of expressing herself, and therefore she has become inhuman and brutal.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

#16. A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.

John Niven

#17. I'd like to be a better writer, but I have no dreams to direct or do a screenplay. And I'd love to have a big starring role in a movie because the paycheck would be bigger. That's the only reason I do films.

Henry Rollins

#18. 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

#19. No, sir.' She withdrew her hand. 'Quoting Shakespeare will get you nowhere.

Jane Aiken Hodge

#20. Never take no for an answer. It took me 20 years between the time I wrote my first screenplay and the time I actually got money to direct a movie.

Julie Delpy

#21. Lawmakers have good reason to want a healthy broadcast industry. Broadcast TV stations provide more than 186,000 jobs on an annual basis, which directly generate more than $30 billion in economic activity.

Gordon Smith

#22. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

Bret Easton Ellis

#23. Knowledge of God's Word is a bulwark against deception, temptation, accusation, even persecution.

Edwin Louis Cole

#24. '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

#25. 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

#26. Movies are not the book. Movies are not even the screenplay. They are the movie.

Bruce Joel Rubin

#27. THE ONLY WAY TO GET RID OF THE FEAR OF DOING SOMETHING IS TO GO OUT AND DO IT.

Susan Jeffers

#28. It seems that when you get to a certain age you almost give yourself permission to misbehave and say what you think. People allow it, with very old people.

Julie Walters

#29. I wrote a screenplay for a 'Sweet Valley High' adaptation, and it's really amazing to me how many women who are my age have responded to the idea and are excited about the movie.

Diablo Cody

#30. Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.

William Monahan

#31. Once I was in college, I was actually trying to write a comedy screenplay and I wrote basically the worst movie ever and just threw it away and never showed anybody. Everyone needs to get that first bad screenplay out of your system before you start writing other stuff.

Scot Armstrong

#32. To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

Christopher McQuarrie

#33. Siberia is so big, it's almost more an idea than a place

Ian Frazier

#34. 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

#35. Repeating an affirmation several times a day keeps you focused on your goal, strengthens your motivation, and programs your subconscious by sending an order to your crew to do whatever it takes to make that goal happen.

Jack Canfield

#36. Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

Gene Hackman

#37. If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I'd love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.

Al Yankovic

#38. What will you do?"
"Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie."
"What are you going to call it?"
"Hollywood."
"Hollywood?"
"Yes ...

Charles Bukowski

#39. I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

Richard Price

#40. When you're writing a screenplay every scene needs to change from positive to negative, or negative to positive, and constantly trying to change the values of the movie.

Sam De Jong

#41. So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

Nora Ephron

#42. The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

Ray Bradbury