A Quote by David Nicholls

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

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David Nicholls
English - Novelist
Born: November 30, 1966

I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.

Mark Haddon

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

Zadie Smith

Cinema is a visual language, and you're always looking for visual metaphors for things. You know, if I was writing a play about Howard Hughes, I could have him give a monologue about how he's terrified to touch a doorknob. But on screen, you know, working with Marty Scorsese in 'The Aviator,' that became the series of images that told a story.

John Logan

The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.

Richard Thaler

The impetus for 'Power' was me writing about my dad, who was an advertising executive and very interested in image. He thought that perception was reality and what people thought of you was what was real about you.

Courtney A. Kemp

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.

Lisa Joy

Most good actors you work with, they actually bring something to the creative process and to the script. They help shape the character with you. Whereas, some actors are so worried about their image and not about the character, it doesn't help the story.

Zoya Akhtar

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

To me, it seems more realistic to my thought process when things feel a little scattered in the lyrics. Being disjointed is not that abstract of a thing when I think about how my brain works - I feel like it's almost more realistic. That's how my brain works.

Aesop Rock

When I started writing short stories, I thought I was writing a novel. I had like 60 or 70 pages. And what I realized was that I don't write inner monologue. I don't want to talk about what somebody is thinking or feeling. I wanted to try to show it in an interesting way. And so what I realized was that I was really writing a screenplay.

Shane Carruth

I've often said, not totally jokingly, that screenwriting doesn't really qualify as real writing at all. You don't string sentences into paragraphs. You don't maintain a constant breath, or create internal rhythms, or even develop a fully-formed thought. The camera does all that work for you!

Jonathan Raymond

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Adam Johnson

People have a good image of me. It's not these tramps who are going to tarnish my image. They should stop lying to the French people. It annoys me that people talk about 'your image'. My image is great in France. When I'm abroad, I don't even talk about it. But in France it's just these people, these parasites.

Patrice Evra

For me, the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form, because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing, the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

Gunter Brus

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.

Robert Hass

I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

Martin McDonagh

A Quote by David Nicholls

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