Screenwriting Quotes

“I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.”

“Greatness is achieved through kindness, compassion, and love.”

“All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.”

“What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.”

“The first thing our Chapman screenwriting professors taught us was that all stories share one thing in common: there is a protagonist, and that protagonist has a goal that he or she has difficulty achieving. Does Luke Skywalker become Luke Skywalker if he doesn't get pulled into the Death Star, if his best friend isn't turned into carbonite?”

“Once you see the entertainment world from both sides, you really get a greater understanding of how it all operates. As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural and what an actor could actually say.”

“'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.”

“Peace is when we look upon the world together.”

“I just stopped playing. I did some screenwriting and got into the nature thing. Music kind of went away.”

“Her words dance on the page.”

“The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.”

“As a rule, I think people in L.A. are interested in any writer who brings a different skill set and experiences. There's an attraction to novelty and to anyone whose writing isn't based in screenwriting. I had that novelty.”

“Transform into your dream.”

“Even though I was trained in play writing and screenwriting, when I sat down to write a comic book for the first time, Alan Moore was first and foremost in my mind.”

“Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.”

“Love is alive when there's music in your heart.”

“I was about 14 when I started with a theater group; it was like a stage group on the weekends alongside school. And it was run by a group of guys who'd been to drama school themselves in London. So they introduced us to techniques that they'd learn about, and they kind of informed us about improvisation and screenwriting and all of that stuff.”

“Want a role? Fuck a screenwriter.”

“I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.”

“Screenwriting is like poker; in the end, you have to go all in.”