Quotes by Screenwriters - Page 154

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.
Woody Allen
Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.
Stephen King
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.
Raymond Chandler
In Hollywood, no one knows anything.
William Goldman
When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.
Preston Sturges
As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
Stephen King
Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford
Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
Neil Gaiman
When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
Stephen King
You wanna be the next Tolkien? Don't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. TOLKIEN didn't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. He read books on finnish philology. You go and read outside your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. And then the most important thing, once you get any level of quality--get to the point where you wanna write, and you can write--is tell YOUR story. Don't tell a story anyone else can tell. Because you always start out with other people's voices... There will always be people who are better or smarter than you. There are people who are better writers than me, who plot better than I do, but there is no one who can tell a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
Neil Gaiman
Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.
Neil Gaiman
But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.")
Neil Gaiman
Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.
Neil Gaiman
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
Dashiell Hammett
I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.
Neil Gaiman
Margaret: Can I - can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President's name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President's name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else?Margaret: Yeah! Or... do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?Leo: I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'etat!Margaret: Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that.Leo: I would think. And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?Margaret: It was just for fun.
Aaron Sorkin
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]
John Osborne
Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it -- if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure.
Warren Ellis
He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.
Dashiell Hammett
Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.
Lori Lansens
If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.
Robert McKee
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.
Roald Dahl
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Ray Bradbury
I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.
J.K. Rowling
Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.
Warren Ellis
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
Neil Gaiman
Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.
Neil Gaiman
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.
Stephen King
I write out of revenge.
William Goldman
Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent.
Aaron Sorkin
You are either born a writer or you are not.
Cormac McCarthy
Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?
Stephen King
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
Paul Rudnick
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him...A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
Roald Dahl
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
Stephen King
My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...''He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.
Neil Gaiman
We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
Steven Pressfield
I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.
Stephen King
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
Stephen King
On the whole, stories don't write themselves.
Neil Gaiman
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.
Thomas Harris
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King
I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
Aaron Sorkin
you must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King
Writers will happen in the best of families.
Rita Mae Brown
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
Stephen King
Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning?" "The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right now he's in the residence eating Cheerios and enjoying Regis and Kathie Lee. Should I get him for you?" "Sarcasm's a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age, Mrs. Landingham." "What age would that be, Toby?""Late twenties?" "Atta boy.
Aaron Sorkin
Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
Paul Auster
Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.
Warren Ellis
Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
Ray Bradbury
The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.
Alan Dean Foster
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
William Goldman
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Françoise Sagan
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
Ian McEwan
To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
Akira Kurosawa
The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
Steven Pressfield
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.
Neil Gaiman
The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end." That's how much better it is.
Warren Ellis