Top 100 Screenwriting's Quotes
#1. I have struggles in screenwriting that lead me to a third act that's always more or less efficiently wrapped up in a fourth act that's trying to give closure to too many things.
Xavier Dolan
#2. If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.
Robert McKee
#3. I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!
Paul Schrader
#4. I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue.
David Benioff
#5. Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.
Meg Cabot
#6. Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue.
Jonathan Tropper
#7. I didn't write 'Snow White' for any class, but I got bitten by the screenwriting bug and wrote a couple of scripts in my spare time instead of going to keg parties or something.
Evan Daugherty
#8. 'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
John Irving
#10. In fiction, I have a residual guilt when I focus on story over language or mood or whatever - the more "literary" things. In screenwriting, I don't have that guilt because story is the only thing. Character, dialogue, everything else - they feed into and drive story.
Nick Antosca
#12. With prose, I know where I'm starting and I think I know where I'm going.
Paul T. Scheuring
#13. It's a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism - everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I'm trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way." In
Gerald Clarke
#14. It's an enormous wall that's built between you and your dreams. And if every day, you just chip away ... It may take ten years, but eventually you just might see some light.
Edward Burns
#16. If you don't think screenwriting is a work of art, good luck in your life without a soul.
A.D. Posey
#17. 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.
Nick Cave
#18. All screenwriting books are bullshit, all. Watch movies, read screenplays. Let them be your guide.
Brian Koppelman
#19. I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
William Monahan
#20. The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.
Billy Marshall Stoneking
#21. I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.
Charlie Kaufman
#22. Is every writer's keyboard a spill magnet?
A.D. Posey
#23. Peace is when we look upon the world together.
A.D. Posey
#24. There is magic in the old and magic in the new; the trick is to successfully combine the two.
A.D. Posey
#25. I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.
Mara Brock Akil
#26. I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.
Simon Beaufoy
#27. I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair.
Scott Frank
#28. Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.
William Monahan
#29. I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.
Charlie Kaufman
#30. All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.
John Yorke
#31. There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.
Jonathan Tropper
#32. The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.
John Logan
#33. The answer to the question, 'where's the drama?' is another question: 'what's the problem?
Billy Marshall Stoneking
#34. The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
William Monahan
#35. My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision.
Dan Gilroy
#36. I studied writing at university, and I actually majored in screenwriting. Then I went to work as a bookseller and then as a sales rep and publicist and then various editorial jobs until I ended up with HarperCollins in Australia.
Garth Nix
#37. 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.
David Nicholls
#38. For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.
Justin Zackham
#39. The personal screenplay- where you dive into the terrifying depths of your soul, unearth the most intimate details about yourself, and put it on paper for the world to see. Proceed with caution, for madness lies ahead.
A.D. Posey
#40. I want to get off with the screenwriting.
Obie Trice
#41. Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.
Nick Antosca
#42. Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Ian McEwan
#43. I had always been interested in screenwriting, ever since I could write things down as a child. Obviously, I started as an actor, professionally, but screenwriting was always something that I had a great interest in.
John Francis Daley
#44. Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."
Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously.
Carrie Fisher
#46. As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.
John Fusco
#47. 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.
Raymond Chandler
#48. Inspiring someone else to follow their dreams is the hope of anyone who has the courage to follow their own.
Dawn Garcia
#49. Screenwriting is not an artform, it is a punishment from God.
Fran Lebowitz
#50. [G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.
Kate Wright
#51. Storytelling answers questions and solves mysteries.
A.D. Posey
#52. 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
#53. Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a half of a credit on maybe one movie, or none. So they're all theoretical.
Thomas Lennon
#54. I'm generally somebody who hopes for the best. It's not what one ought to do in my line of work [screenwriting], but it is what I do.
Jonathan Tropper
#55. I guess I considered myself just sort of a sketch comedian, you know? Actual screenwriting hadn't really occurred to me as a viable job - I didn't really know anything about it.
Thomas Lennon
#56. People don't really want original stories. they want different versions of the same story. this is called meta-narrative.
Chester Elijah Branch
#57. 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
#59. As a writer, you're the guy in the box. You're creating and you have these euphorias.
Paul T. Scheuring
#60. I don't mind doing scripted material. It's actually kind of a relief, because improvising is a little bit like screenwriting on your feet.
John C. Reilly
#61. Novelist by day; screenwriter by night.
A.D. Posey
#62. Screenwriting is still a challenge for me. It's more technical than creative. You have to be a very good journeyman plumber and put the proper parts together. Then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you have done as much as can be expected.
Leigh Brackett
#63. Once you see the entertainment world from both sides, you really get a greater understanding of how it all operates. As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural and what an actor could actually say.
John Francis Daley
#64. Screenwriting is like poker; in the end, you have to go all in.
A.D. Posey
#65. Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.
Paul Thomas Anderson
#66. Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful.
Gerard De Marigny
#67. Love is alive when there's music in your heart.
A.D. Posey
#69. Screenwriting and making movies is really playing make-believe like most of us did as children.
Gabriel Campisi
#70. 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
#71. The whole purpose of screenwriting is to convey everything through action and dialogue and not explanation and exposition. To me, there are movies where voiceover works really well because it does something more than exposition; it actually becomes a tonal element of the movie.
Jonathan Tropper
#72. For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.
Simon Beaufoy
#73. Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.
James L. Brooks
#74. I was a screenwriting and studio art major in college, so even though I don't have any training as a floral designer, I have a very particular visual aesthetic.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#75. 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
#76. I just always remember myself as the teenager with questions about movies and screenwriting. I would hope that there was somebody out there who would answer those questions, and so, if I can take a few minutes to do it, I will. It's not threatening for us. We're not being stalked, so it's easier.
John August
#77. Screenwriting Joe Eszterhas have always talked about the charm of evil.
Chris Hayes
#78. Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.
Jonathan Tropper
#79. All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
Robert McKee
#80. Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.
Robert McKee
#82. ... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves.
John Yorke
#84. What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.
Mike Birbiglia
#85. Having spent a lot of time trying to figure out screenwriting, I do feel moved and I want to try to write good roles for women of every age.
Brit Marling
#86. If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?
Louis Malle
#87. It's when you feel worse, that's when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit.
Paul T. Scheuring
#88. The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.
Mylo Carbia
#89. Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.
Dave Barry
#90. Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn't, but it should be.
Hugh Laurie
#91. I'm from the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of screenwriting. I just like to preserve what works and ignore what doesn't work.
Andrew Dominik
#93. I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.
Alan Alda
#95. In terms of screenwriting adaptations it's trying to cut out stuff that's extraneous, without doing damage to the original piece, because you owe a debt of some respect to the original author. That's why it was bought.
Rod Serling
#96. Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it's an abstract thing, it's not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps - often I'll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through.
Tony Grisoni
#97. Even though I was trained in play writing and screenwriting, when I sat down to write a comic book for the first time, Alan Moore was first and foremost in my mind.
Brian K. Vaughan
#98. I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.
Zoe Kazan
#99. There's a story you write, there's a story you shoot and there's a story you cut.
Paul T. Scheuring
#100. Everyone has their truth. Mine lies in the cinema.
Dawn Garcia
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