Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by Tony Gilroy

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Corporations are like countries now, there's a king, there are serfs, there's a court, basically everything but moats. They're feudal societies, and there are good ones and bad ones.

When I start something, I know people I am working with, it's a project they're interested in.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

I can't imagine directing from someone else's script.

I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell.

Once a film costs a certain amount of money, things have to round off.

I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I'm supposed to.

I wanted to try before I got too old to try to do a big movie and I'd been looking for something to do that was interesting enough to spend those two years of my life on.

I don't like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.

I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.

I'm trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that.

The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there's a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.

You change or you hide your head in the sand.

I used to be, when I was young, I used to be extremely regular and very organized.

I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.

I've never taken a job on anything I didn't want to do.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

You can't teach someone to be imaginative.

No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter.

I like movies that pop, that have a little bit of candy on, that freedom to have a little bit of extra fun, but are rooted in real behaviour. Rooted in cause and effect, never violating reality.

The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

I worked for a lot of directors.

I prefer writing originals.

I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.

Different people work different ways.

You just try to find something that interests you, and particular something that interests you that's gonna consume you the way that these big movies just really eat you up.

What you need to know to direct a movie is [of] such great variety. I've worked with people who were maestros, who know everything. I've worked with people who were empty and lost, who had no clue what they were doing. You wouldn't hire them to paint your apartment. And then there's everything in-between. There's no list of skills you have to have to sit in that chair.

You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

But what I didn't recognize when I was much younger was this sort of...when you're on, when you're really on, go at it.

I love IMAX when it works right.