Quotes About Writing Screenplays

#1. I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays.

Leonard Mlodinow

#2. I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.

Diablo Cody

#3. If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

Quentin Tarantino

#4. At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

Rose Tremain

#5. Writing screenplays is incredibly hard. I can't call it joy. Writing Novels? Joy. Directing? Joy. Writing Screenplays? That's where you pay all your dues.

Stephen Chbosky

#6. My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#7. I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.

Peter Landesman

#8. For me, if Shakespeare was around today, he'd be writing screenplays - a big Hollywood movie.

Douglas Booth

#9. When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.

William Monahan

#10. I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.

Emily Mortimer

#11. I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.

Peter Landesman

#12. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial.

Rebecca Miller

#13. Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.

Nick Cave

#14. When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They'd be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I'd get.

Bill Hader

#15. I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

Gia Coppola

#16. Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.

Elmore Leonard

#17. The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

Ridley Scott

#18. When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

Taiye Selasi

#19. He took me from not being able to write a word in terms of writing screenplays to being the king of wooden dialogue.

George Lucas

#20. I write mostly as a director. That's why my screenplays are very detailed. So I get into the images I see. I like that.

Deepa Mehta

#21. There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

Quentin Tarantino

#22. When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

Jonathan Tropper

#23. When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.

Sasha Alexander

#24. Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

Emma Thompson

#25. Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write.

Dolph Lundgren

#26. I'm currently writing a screenplay that I haven't started yet.

Serena Williams

#27. I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

Blake Jenner

#28. I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made.

Joe R. Lansdale

#29. I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Quentin Tarantino

#30. 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

#31. So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all.

Guillermo Del Toro

#32. I have a couple screenplays that are done, and I'm looking for the right people to help me make them. I do a lot of television writing to develop new ideas for shows.

Jimmi Simpson

#33. Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru!

Jeff Lyons

#34. The idea of directing was something that I always had in the back of my mind, and writing as well. I began to write screenplays when I was in my 20's.

Charles Martin Smith

#35. I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

Chris Wooding

#36. There is magic in the old and magic in the new; the trick is to successfully combine the two.

A.D. Posey

#37. Suddenly I was writing a lot of screenplays, and I was no long in New York, so I stopped acting in plays, and it just became too tricky to find a part to play, either in a play or a film that coincided with my schedule writing and or directing.

Michael Cristofer

#38. Makebelieve is a writer's best friend.

Solange Nicole

#39. Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.

Ray Bradbury

#40. I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I'm in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It's a very freeing thing.

Daniel Clowes

#41. In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

William Goldman

#42. The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.

Nicholas Sparks

#43. I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

Cary Fukunaga

#44. With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Jeff Lyons

#45. 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

#46. Novelist by day; screenwriter by night.

A.D. Posey

#47. Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful.

Gerard De Marigny

#48. I'm very keen. Adaptations of other people's work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that'd be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it's become one of my favorite genres.

Emma Donoghue

#49. When I moved out to Los Angeles to get some film and television work, and couldn't get any ... I became a little isolated, a little terrified, and it's a good place to get writing, because you're so bored. So I wrote a few screenplays, and people notice those.

Clark Gregg

#50. There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive.
Someone has to survive

Chris Dietzel