Screenplay Quotes
The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I'm interested in and then I decide I'm going to explore it. I don't know where the characters are going to go, I don't know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that's the way to keep it alive.
Charlie Kaufman
The last person they expected to connect with a screenplay was the comedic, blonde actress with the funny voice.
Joey Lauren Adams
You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that's it.
Rita Mae Brown
I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
Rupert Sanders
I look for an interesting and often times, fresh character. Something different that what is done all the time or than I've done recently. I look at who is directing. Those two variables as well as a third, which is the content and the quality of the screenplay. I look at the arcs of the scenes and characters and relationships.
William Baldwin
I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
John Irving
Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.
Yahoo Serious
I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.
Preston Sturges
It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.
Christopher Darden
Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.
Griffin Dunne
This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.
Robert B. Parker
I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
Nora Ephron
There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.
Charlie Kaufman
So on my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of pictorial reference.
Adrian Lyne
You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.
Richard Russo
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
You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?
Robert Towne
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.
Dirk Benedict
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
Harold Ramis
A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.
Nicholas Meyer
I'm working on a screenplay right now for the BBC, but I hope to have the decks cleared soon so I can get into the studio with my pals and put down some more tracks, try to get a strong dance single together.
Irvine Welsh
I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.
Jacques Derrida
I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.
Kate DiCamillo
Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
For me, when working on a film or play or television show, everything for me starts with the screenplay and I am devoted to that and that is what I work from. Any research I do or any preparation I do on my own is all ultimately in service of that.
James Spader
About a year ago I got really exhausted from reading bad scripts and I know that I am a writer and that I have stories to tell, so I thought, 'Let's do this!' So I'm co-writing a screenplay now with another screenwriter and loving it. Absolutely loving it. And I would like to be the producer on the project and of course the lead is me.
Kerry Washington
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