Top 79 Screenwriters Quotes & Sayings

My parents were screenwriters, and they had four daughters and we all write. So that's amazing. Talk about powerful parents. My mother always said to us, "Everything is copy."

There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy.

I grew up in the Midwest; you don't know any screenwriters. It didn't seem like a realistic career possibility.

I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn't presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.

Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.

It's a tough time for screenwriters right now, because fewer movies are getting made. I'm enjoying television so much. It offers opportunities for writers to be in a writers' room and work their way up. It's somewhat easier because there's more of a community. There are so many screenwriters with incredible stories to tell, so I hope there will be some kind of shift in the business where very few types of movies are now made by the studios. There needs to be different budgets for different audiences; not everything having to be a huge opening weekend.

I would say, and as I have said before, the series [Narcos] does not demonstrate real happenings but rather events that the screenwriters, in their own taste, believe depict the way we lived.

Many actors in films are willing to go to Broadway, and screenwriters are writing plays. It's almost commonplace.

I've never been conscious of having any real career plan, and I do not have a wish-list of actors, directors, screenwriters, or cameramen I'm hoping to work with. Life, I feel, has a way of leading us to the right situations and people, or at least to interesting ones.

If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We've seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon.

The other thing being at UCLA was just being in California and around the movie business. Which I honestly believe, and I've told this to screenwriters, you have to do. You have to be there in order to write or direct movies.

The simple idiot's advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, 'Write good.'

A lot of screenwriters have a drawer of unsold scripts that they cut their teeth on. I don't have one. Everything I've written, after my first spec, I wrote on assignment. Everything I've written was work.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.

I have seen too many screenwriters of promise become formula addicts and slaves to stop watch structure. Spend that time watching movies, reading screenplays, reading plays, and most importantly - write from your gut.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

Graphic novels and comic books offer an easy foothold into that world, and screenwriters and studio execs gravitate toward those, because I think they can see it all right there. It's like, "Here's what the movie looks like."

During the '90s, a lot of us in the indie film world were not making our money off our movies. We were screenwriters doing scripts for hire for studios.

Hollywood is a special place; a place filled with creative geniuses - actors, screenwriters, directors, sound engineers, computer graphics specialists, lighting experts and so on. Working together, great art happens. But in the end, all artists depend on diverse audiences who can enjoy, be inspired by and support their work.

Though 'Moneyball' had the talents of screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin going for it, they weren't baseball insiders.

Here's my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do.

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

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

One of our jobs as screenwriters is to never lose sight of the character.

L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don't know why. On many levels, it's such a thankless occupation.

Writers - all writers, even screenwriters - like to make their mark. I don't think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers.

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.

Screenwriters get paid a hell of a lot more money but their level of frustration seems to be so high that I don't want that.

India needs better producers than screenwriters. No producer wants to invest in out-of-the way scripts.

The fact is that HBO is doing the kind of films and the kind of stories that the movie industry used to do. You look at a lot of the specialty sections of studios that have gone under... and there's no doubt in my mind why filmmakers and screenwriters and actors are ending up at a place like HBO. They do it better than anybody.

'Off With Their Heads' by Frances Marion. I love a showbusiness autobiography - and this one resonates because it's written by one of the great Hollywood screenwriters.

Supernatural films allow you to bend the rules of time and space - that's really fun, especially for screenwriters who often get shot down for logic reasons.

A lot of screenwriters write certain characters, certain parts, with actors in mind. I don't really tend to do that. I describe them as specifically as I can, but I don't really picture anyone in particular.

A trap screenwriters can fall into is making scripts that are good reads, which doesn't necessarily mean it will make a good film.

People kept passing our [ with Robert Ben Garant] script around, and suddenly we had this reputation as screenwriters, which we're not - we're sketch comedy guys.

When things aren't working out, screenwriters have a tendency to say, "Go do other things," but you shouldn't do other things. You need to stay at your desk and continue to try to write. You need to insist on it.

You were taught how to do the things you needed to do. Dance, speech, fencing. They groomed people. If you were in a film, and the script wasn't working for you, they brought in screenwriters and fixed the scripts.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

The film industry is driven by male narrative. Heads of studios are often men, teeming with male executives everywhere you look, and so the narratives we have the screenwriters usually for male leads. Women tend to be second string: the girlfriend of, the secretary who becomes.

Comedians who aren't screenwriters are telling jokes that they themselves think are funny. They're expressing their own view of what they think funny is.

I like hearing from everybody and not just my co-screenwriters or producers. For example, while on set, I find it valuable to turn to my PA and ask, 'What do you think? Is this scene working? Do you like what you see? You got any ideas for that line there because that idea isn't working for me.'

I tell my students based on my experiences in Hollywood, sure, you can always move to L.A. and try to work with the system, and people do that, but chances are if you want your story in film with characters of color, you will have to make that movie yourself. Find a way to make it yourself. Not just screenwriters, but also producers.

In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer - I write about games.

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

There’s a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

You never meet other screenwriters because it's such a lonely profession.

As screenwriters, we struggle with our own success. We have wallpapered our world and now we can't get anyone to notice the picture we just hung.

I hate when people say, 'Oh, they laughed all the way to the bank.' That's nonsense because the most cynical, unhappy people are Hollywood screenwriters. They earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for work that's never made.

Filmmakers now have the freedom to create the type of movie they want. More screenwriters, directors, and producers now have the chance to see their words on screen now that VOD and streaming outlets are available. Overall, it's a good thing for filmmaking and documentarians.

Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that.

I wouldn't say I see things visually first, but what I do think is important, for a lot of screenwriters, is to not just think about the words on the page, but also the world as a whole and the vibe of the movie, rather than a sequence of scenes written on the page.

Now, I don't know if we're at a place where we can see a nuanced transgender villain, because unless it can be written in a way that their transness is not the cause of them being evil, I don't think a lot of cis screenwriters are willing to do that. It's all through their lens of assumptions.

Hollywood screenwriters tend to have the longevity of NFL running backs. So the truth is no one can put more pressure on us than we put on ourselves.

Obviously there's a lot more to a TV show than just a book... I think adaptations are a bit tricky for the screenwriters because they're worried about upsetting the author.

Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.

Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.

There are a lot of women screenwriters, but they are obviously outnumbered by men. And it still is a very much male-dominated industry.

There are so many screenwriters with incredible stories to tell, so I hope there will be some kind of shift in the business where very few types of movies are now made by the studios. There needs to be different budgets for different audiences; not everything having to be a huge opening weekend.

There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!

Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.