Top 403 Screenplay Quotes & Sayings

First, there has been a lot of interest in The Drive-in, but, alas, it hasn't actually come to fruition. Maybe soon. Don really got Bubba and I didn't think it could be a film. I thought it was too odd to make it to film. He asked me to do the screenplay, but I declined. I didn't see that it could be a screenplay but he wrote one and proved me wrong. He was always considerate about what I thought about the film and the story's presentation, but in the end, he's the director and he had to make decisions. All good ones.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

You cannot live in Los Angeles for any period of time without eventually trying to write a screenplay. It's like a flu bug that you catch ... Even the plumber has a screenplay in his truck.

Well, I kind of approach both of them similarly in (that) I always see it as a movie first because that's my background. Cindy Kelley, who has been my writing partner on my novels, she works more on the prose side and the description side of the storytelling because, obviously, there's a lot more of that in a novel than in a screenplay. You only have up to 120 pages in a screenplay.

I've done some stuff with Thomas Jane and Tim Bradstreet in the comic world and it was interesting to me how close to a screenplay a comic can be. Certainly a four issue comic can be a four act structured screenplay and so I would totally be for that.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

I think longer that you sit on a screenplay the longer you sit. I'm a firm believer that you can write the magic out of a movie, out of a screenplay. I'm not saying that the first draft is always the best draft but a lot of times the magic is in the first couple of drafts. T

A screenplay adaptation of my 'Punktown' novel 'Health Agent' has been making the rounds. The screenplay was written by my friend, singer/songwriter Walter Egan of 'Magnet & Steel' fame!

I've never read a screenplay in advance. You trust the artist.

The success of a film depends on the screenplay, and nothing else.

I couldn't read a screenplay without puking.

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

The secret to writing a screenplay is keeping your ass in the chair.

A great screenplay is the most powerful bait in Hollywood.

If there's a good screenplay, there's a chance that something good is going to happen. If you don't have a brilliant screenplay, then you either have amazing actors who give you the chance to improve whatever is on the page, or an interesting director who has enough faith in the project that they can carry it through and get it somewhere.

Language is never a problem when you have the screenplay ready.

Roles don't fascinate me. It is the narrative, the screenplay that is fascinating.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot.

'Sunspring,' the first known screenplay written by an AI, was produced recently. It is awesome. Awesomely awful. But it's worth watching all ten minutes of it to get a taste of the gap between a great screenplay and something an AI can currently produce.

I wanted to make a movie once at Lake of the Woods, where my parents had a cabin, which I now have. We actually planned, we wrote a whole screenplay about a kind of Indian spiritual group that was at Lake of the Woods. We weren't calling it that but it was Lake of the Woods. We wrote a whole screenplay about it but we couldn't get funding for it.

A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver.

You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.

Bollywood movies ignore screenplay, if you notice whichever movie is a hit has an interesting screenplay.

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.

We now live in a world both in film and television where everything is based on something. You point out, "Star Wars" was an original screenplay, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," an original screenplay, "Ghostbusters" an original screenplay, "Back to the Future." All these things that people love were original ideas many years ago.

I am not anti-man. I am married to a man... I have a father and a brother... I love men. But there is something really lacking when Cake is nominated. How does Julianne Moore win for Best Actress but her film isn't nominated for Best Screenplay? How does Gone Girl become such a critically-acclaimed and box-office hit but its scriptwriter, Gillian Flynn, isn't nominated for Best screenplay. It's disgusting!

I want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who's ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that - four is enough. And do it within ten films, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar 'the Quentin.' And everybody's down with that.

If I get lucky and I can choose, I would always choose a really good story and screenplay, even if I don't know the director. If there's a good screenplay, there's a chance that something good is going to happen.

There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.

Once I was in college, I was actually trying to write a comedy screenplay and I wrote basically the worst movie ever and just threw it away and never showed anybody. Everyone needs to get that first bad screenplay out of your system before you start writing other stuff.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

When I set out to write a screenplay, I have in my mind a beginning and an end but that end part continually changes as I start to write the middle. That way by the time the screenplay is finished I have taken myself and my audience from a familiar beginning point through the story to an unfamiliar ending point.

I had gone to the bookstore, and while I hadn't bought any books on how to write a screenplay, I'd bought a couple of scripts so I could see how the formatting works. I just needed to know how a Hollywood screenplay looked on the page, which was something I was totally unfamiliar with.

I present the nominees, well, not me the Voice of God, for Best Screenplay.

Everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay.

'Basha' is the best screenplay in my career.

What is a screenplay? 120 pages of begging for money and attention.

I'm currently writing a screenplay that I haven't started yet.

If youre writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

It is very challenging to make a fresh screenplay based on a used plot.

'Pitch Perfect' was my first screenplay, so it was like my little baby.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. Thats what writing a screenplay is.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

Everybody in L.A. has a screenplay. The guy pumping your gas has a screenplay.

I remember this one time I had a dream about me writing a screenplay, and when I woke up, you know those dreams that feel so real, but I woke up and I was like, 'Oh my god I have this amazing screenplay I need to write down as soon as I wake up' and then I woke up and I was like what the heck was I dreaming of?

Everyone thinks that 'Chinatown' is the best screenplay. I'm not sure it is.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

I'm teaching myself how to screenplay write.

My roommate in college in Austin, Texas, was Wes Anderson. Wes always wanted to be a director. I was an English major in college, and he got us to work on a screenplay together. And then, in working on the screenplay, he wanted my brother, Luke, and me to act in this thing. We did a short film that was kind of a first act of what became Bottle Rocket.

I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!

I wanted to direct long before I'd even written a screenplay.

Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I'm sure it's terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn't know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

I don't mean to talk so much about screenplay writing. Who wants to talk about screenplay writing? I've taught it and I felt like a charlatan because what I was teaching I probably couldn't do.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.