Top 178 Screenwriter Quotes & Sayings

Normally with film, it's normal for the screenwriter to never be seen again after finishing until the premiere.

You don't get to be a good screenwriter unless you do 20, 30 drafts: fact.

You are the executive director and screenwriter of your life.

Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.

When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

As a screenwriter you're the towel boy in the whorehouse. I mean you know you're lucky if you're invited to set. It's kind of like here is the blueprint, go and that's you know there has been some debate as to whether or not a film should be by the director or by the screenwriter or by both.

The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.

When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.

I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.

As a screenwriter, you're always being told: a good scene is one where somebody wants something, the other one doesn't want to give it.

Capra always wanted a screenwriter with him, even on the soundstage. The writer had to be there at his side.

I consider myself a good screenwriter.

I'm a very slow screenwriter. It takes time for me to write a screenplay. Also, I feel it's not my strength.

If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.

I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I'd always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.

As an author and a burgeoning screenwriter, the fact of the matter is I cannot do this alone.

A screenwriter is much like being a fire hydrant with a bunch of dogs lined up around it.

I don't think I'm the best screenwriter in the world. It's just important to me to write my movies so I'm personally invested in them.

Even though I am in this weird position of being a semi-recognizable screenwriter, which isn't that common, at the same time, I'm not an actress. I'm pretty isolated.

Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.

My father was a screenwriter, but he was also a novelist.

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey.

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling, and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey. The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.

I'm an affluent screenwriter and all that - I'm a known screenwriter, but I'm not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.

The filmmaking process is a team effort. A screenwriter cannot possibly do exactly what he wants as if he was writing a novel.

There's a place for art in the world, but it can't be at the top of the list for a working screenwriter.

I think the best black screenwriter is Quentin Tarantino.

My brother is a screenwriter. He likes to say, 'I like to take on a genre when it's dying, because then people are ready for you to shake it up a little bit.'

I have always aspired to be a writer, be it as an author or a screenwriter, whatever the medium.

As a journalist, as a screenwriter and as a director, I'm trying to tell compelling and truthful stories.

I have a lot of screenwriter friends and many of them have had an experience where they aren't even welcome on set during production.

Like everyone else, I use my phone a lot, and being a screenwriter, my laptop is my life.

I was 21, when I heard the story that inspired this [thriller Allied], and I wasn't even a screenwriter then.

Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!

It's really hard as a screenwriter, you feel like you have a vision and then you turn it over to a director and you have to let it go.

I consider my job as a screenwriter to pack a script with possibilities and ideas - to create a feast for the filmmaker to pick from.

When you're a screenwriter, it's like being a mechanic. You open the hood of the story, the director is the driver, and he says, "What do you think? It's a little tough."

As a viewer, I liked screenwriter Park Jae-bum's writing and director Kim Hee-won's directing.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

Chekhov would have been an excellent screenwriter. He is singularly good at dipping in and out of a group of people's lives, like Robert Altman did.

You get to Hollywood and you are in the land of big money where they don't like to see only one screenwriter's name. It's much better if you've got four or five.

What I want is to be the highest grossing screenwriter, or to have some other woman be the highest grossing screenwriter, instead of being number nine on the list. That's my goal.

Pictures are written, acted, directed, photo­graphed, edited, scored and all that. The screenwriter determines what scenes are in and what scenes are out; decides whether that bit of information is dramatized or just referred to; whether it takes place on or off screen. There are millions of decisions made by the screenwriter.

When you're a screenwriter working on a film, you're not really even welcome on set, even if you know... When I wrote 'Elizabeth' and Shekhar Kapur was a friend of mine, but I wasn't really welcome on set, because the director is God and it's a very difficult position for a screenwriter who's put so much passion into that, into the writing.

The Buccaneers was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold screenwriter of Dead Poets' Society.

Screenwriter Flacco nicely evokes the aftermath of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in his fiction debut, a novel of suspense.

My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.

The great thing, as a screenwriter, is that you are always proud of what ends up on the screen, you are able to create something in isolation and you have a lot of freedom.

I see myself maybe being, like, a movie producer or screenwriter or a novelist or a scientist or mathematician.

I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director.

'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

It was okay but then I found myself in that position of being merely a screenwriter. And you are merely the screenwriter, and there's no way around it. You don't have the same clout as the director.

No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter.

The dull externals of the screenwriter's working life are well known: We are the people taking up too much table space at cafes.

I like to write, and I would love to be a screenwriter one day and a director.

With a screenwriter and with the actors there is always an environment of trust. You can say anything, all your secrets, and you know that it won't get out of that room.