Top 40 Screenwriting Quotes

I’ve always been a writer, I’ve always been a storyteller, but I never thought about screenwriting.

I remember watching Quentin Tarantino accept an Academy Award for screenwriting for ‘Pulp Fiction.’ If I’d known then that 15 years later one of his movies would again be nominated for an Oscar and I’d be in it – that would be pretty crazy.

It’s a Hollywood screenwriting notion that change comes because of one epic, soul-crushing event… What’s more common is that the slow decay of the nonevents of your life build up until you can’t take it anymore.

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.

Screenwriting is the most prized of all the cinematic arts. Actually, it isn’t, but it should be.

I think if I’ve worked anything through with screenwriting it’s that I’m not going to be able to work anything through.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

There’s a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone’s scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that’s how I write.

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

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.

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.

For screenwriting, when you’re writing, you’re talking to hundreds – hundreds of people who might be interpreting what you’re saying. When you’re writing a comic book, you’re really only talking to the artist.

Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I’ve read a bunch of screenwriting books over the years and, to be honest, they’re mostly pretty crappy.

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.

I’ve made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn’t exist. One is ‘Write the movie you’d pay to go see.’ Another is ‘Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.’

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

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

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.

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

I’m very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

I wanted to do screenwriting. That’s what I went to school for, but my major was overfilled, and when I got ‘The Daily Show’, I was a semester away from officially starting my major, so I never started that in particular.

I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.

I was a screenwriting major at Georgetown, and I was in class with some really strong writers like Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote ‘The Dark Knight’ with Chris, his brother. He wrote ‘The Prestige,’ the story for ‘Memento.’

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

I just stopped playing. I did some screenwriting and got into the nature thing. Music kind of went away.

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.

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.

I don’t think screenwriting is therapeutic. It’s actually really, really hard for me. It’s not an enjoyable process.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

I wrote the screenplay for ‘Water Lilies’ while I was studying screenwriting at La Femis film school in Paris, and the director Xavier Beauvois, who was on the graduation committee, told me I had to make the film myself.

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.

As a rule, I think people in L.A. are interested in any writer who brings a different skill set and experiences. There’s an attraction to novelty and to anyone whose writing isn’t based in screenwriting. I had that novelty.

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.

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.

I majored in screenwriting and playwriting in school – and wanted to make films as a career. But when I directed my first short in college – which was called ‘Extras’ – I lost thousands of dollars and made an unsatisfying and incomplete film.

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.

I feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it’s just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, ‘I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.’

I definitely have the screenwriting itch.