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Quotes on Directing
Quotes on Screenwriting
  and Writing in General
Quotes on Creativity and Inspiration

Quotes on Screenwriting & Writing

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.
Rod Serling

...talents such as Kipling had... the discipline of Flaubert. ...the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard metre in Paris, to prevent faking... intelligent, disinterested and, above all, he must survive.
Ernest Hemingway - On what it takes to be a writer - from "Green Hills in Africa"

I wanted to see her laugh, to see how her face would respond to what I said, to watch her eyes, to study her gestures.
Paul Auster - On seeing a woman reading one of his books

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there.
Paul Auster

And when he dreams he does not want to write, he does not have the power to dream he wants to write; and when he dreams he wants to write, he does not have the power to dream he does not want to write.
Benedictus de Spinoza

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtably the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.
Jorge Luis Borges

Journalism is the first rough draft of history.
Unknown

A great work must be novel without being far-fetched, frequently sublime, but always natural. The author must know the human heart, and how to make it speak; he must be a poet, without letting any of his characters speak like poets; and he must be a master of his language, using it purely and harmoniously and not letting the rhyme interfere with the sense.
Voltaire - from "Candide"

I began to write, and the past lost some of it's power - I wrote it out of me.
Graham Greene - from "A Sort of Life"

I suppose that every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses characters, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.
Graham Greene - from "A Sort of Life"

A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character alive.
Graham Greene - from "A Sort of Life"

It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee - From "Inherit the Wind"

It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost - on poetry

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the tiem we are longing to move the stars to pity.
Flaubert

This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Overrated, if you ask me.
Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
Toni Morrison

Do not appear so scholarly, I pray you. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood. Do you think a Greek name gives more weight to your reasons?
Molière The Critique of the School for Wives, 1663

The writer who wants to learn how to use dialogue in the motion picture should try to make his story understandable without the spoken word.
Eugene Vale

"When an old man dies in Africa, a whole library is burned down."
African saying

You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it.
Rita Mae Brown

Vi skal være venner og fortælle hinanden mange historier. For hvad er livet? Fremtiden er her ikke endnu, og man kan ikke forudse, hvad den vil bringe. Nutiden er kun et øjeblik, og fortiden er en lang historie. De, der ikke fortæller eller lytter til historier, lever kun for det ene øjeblik, og det er ikke nok.
Fra: Singer: "Eventyrfortælleren Naftali og hans hest Sus"

At følge med I en historie er en speciel aktivitet, I hvilken vi hele tiden forsøger at forudse det fortsatte forløb og udgangen på historien. Samtidig korrigerer vi vores opfattelse af, hvad som skal ske, indtil den falder sammen med det virkelige forløb af historien. Vi siger da, at vi har forstået.
(Ricoeur 1988: 94-95)

"Screenwriting," she once said, "is like writing in the sand with the wind blowing."
Frances Marion

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
Anaïs Nin

I loved Feydeau's one rule of playwriting: Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B. Knock Knock. Enter Character B.
John Guare

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.
Rod Serling

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer

Writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painfull illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell

I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
Chinese proverb

I shall live bad if I do not write and I shall write bad if I do not live.
Francoise Sagan

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
Robert Frost

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment thereafter
Jessamyn West

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister's "Lehrjahre"

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.
Truman Capote

The first draft of everything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway

How can you write if you can't cry?
Ring Lardner

If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?
Louis Malle - telling producers why he wanted John Guare around during the filming of ''Atlantic City''

When you start writing you're 98% pure writer and 2% critic. After you've written for a length of time, you've learned a great deal about your craft, and you've become 2% pure writer and 98% critic. It's like writing uphill.
David Westheimer

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
Paul Rudnick

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler

Lindsay Doran (producer), James Schamus (co-producer), Ang Lee (director) and I had met previously this month to discuss the latest draft of the script, which is what we're all here to work through... Lindsay goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of "writer" rather than actress, therefore no one has to be nice to me.
Emma Thompson

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else-- just tear that motherfucker apart.
Richard Price

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.
Meredith Willson

There was a time when making 'Barney Miller' a hit on the air was my life. I cared about nothing else. That was all I was concerned with. And I told my wife and I told my children if it costs me my relationship with my family, I'm committing five years of my life to making the best television show I can possibly make. Whatever it costs, under any circumstance. And I hocked my house, and I gave up my salary and I did everything to give the show a chance to start going. And that's what you have to do.
Danny Arnold

They have followed their usual procedure and handed my treatment over to several other people to make a screenplay out of it. By the time they are ready to shoot it may have been through 20 pairs of hands. What will be left? One shudders to think. Meanwhile, they have paid me a lot of money...
Aldous Huxley

They scowled at dialogue, shuddered at jokes, and wrestled with a script until they had shaken out of it all the verbal glitter and bright plotting. Thus they were able to bring to the screen evidence only of their own 'genius.'
Ben Hecht
on working with some directors

Todd interfered in every conceivable department of the production, not excluding my own; indeed, so far as I know, he is now rewriting the picture as he goes along, grinding the crank, building the sets, unnerving the actors, and generally qualifying as an up-to-date Leonardo da Vinci. It's inaccurate to describe his cyclonic conduct as energy or vitality-- it's much more a violent frenzy I'm sure the head-shrinkers could classify.
S.J. Perelman
on Mike Todd, during the making of "Around the World in 80 Days"

My chief memory of movieland is of asking in the producer's office why I must change the script, eviscerate it, cripple and hamstring it? Why must I strip the hero of his few semi-intelligent remarks and why must I tack on a corny ending that makes the stomach shudder? Half of all the movie writers argue in this fashion. The other half writhe in silence, and the psychoanalysts couch or the liquor bottle claim them both.
Ben Hecht

Listen carefully, shake your head thoughtfully, then leave them in the dark... where you found them.
Jack Sowards
on listening to the meanderings of studio development executives

Writers are lucky. Whatever the mood, no matter the longing, the writer can use his words to connect himself to any world he wishes to visit.
Alan Zweibel
from "Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner: A Sort of Love Story."

Don't you know the finest things in the world have been written on an empty stomach?"
Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman, Jr., "Sunset Boulevard"

To me, that's disaster. Who's the authority in that case? I've seen that, and I think it's utterly unendurable, and usually the actor's wrong. Generally speaking, actors are not writers. I try not to change the script because I think you get into a funny area there. If you start opposing the writer, you lose any sense of discipline, and half the time you're opposed because you aren't actually prepared to face the problem. You can fool yourself so easily that way. I mean, if you've taken the part because the writing is good, then it's your business to find a way to play it, not change it because it suits your whim. To me, there's nothing to take the place of good dramatic writing. Nothing.
John Hurt
replying to the question ''How do you feel about American stars' power to change the script?''

A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day."
Pierre Beaumarchais

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
Mark Twain

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Norman Mailer

It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.
Anton Chekhov

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus 1874-1936

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
Somerset Maugham

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Saki (H.H. Munro)

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought; there is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Victor Hugo

The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work.
Janet Frame

Today is a dawdly day. They do seem to alternate. I do a whole of a day's work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle....The crazy thing is that I get about the same number of words down either way.
John Steinbeck

Writers write about what obsesses them.
Anne Rice

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a writer.
Harlan Ellison

I've only written a tenth of what I know-- and they're already screaming.
Albert Camus

It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident or coincidence....
Ernst Lubitsch

I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I write and I understand.
Chinese proverb

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
Catherine Drinker Bowen

The writer is by nature a dreamer-- a conscious dreamer.
Carson McCullers

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.
William Sansom

I shall live bad if I do not write and I shall write bad if I do not live.
Francoise Sagan

First get your facts; then you may distort them at your leisure.
Mark Twain

The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw

Writers have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind's anchorage, the soul's Great Good Place.
Wright Morris

[His] style is detestable; but it is not the worst thing about him.
Samuel Coleridge on Edward Gibbon (From ''Fighting Words,'' edited by James Charlton)

...I had decided that the only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any
Russell Baker

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
Robert Frost

I loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.
S.J. Perelman

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Peter Abelard, in "Letter S, Abelard to Heloise"

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley

A writer is always admired most, not by those who have read him, but by those who have merely heard of him.
H.L. Mencken

Little presses write to me for manuscripts and when I write back that I haven't any, they write to ask if they can print the letter saying I haven't any.
John Steinbeck

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who had ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
W.H. Auden

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes books.
P.G. Wodehouse

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Quentin Crisp

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
William Gass

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.
Leo Rosten

Writers are only rarely likable.
Joan Didion

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
Edward Albee

The whole world can be divided into those who write and those who do not write.
Soren Kierkegaard

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
William Saroyan

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.
Jules Renard

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard

Fifty years old and still only a writer!
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

I think that the fact that I've been pretty successful and don't have too many really terrible shows, and have a reasonable amount of good ones around is that I've always thought that I was as good as the material and no better. And I once wrote for Peter Sellers and I saw how that poor man was preyed upon by film producers who'd say ''Ah, don't worry about the script, Peter. You're so funny, you'd be funny without the script.'' The moment that you start believing that you can be funny in a situation that isn't any good...
John Cleese

My work is at a typewriter. It always will be.
Garrison Keillor

In the afternoons, Gertrude Stein and I used to go antique hunting in the local shops, and I remember once asking her if she thought I should become a writer. In the typically cryptic way we were all so enchanted with, she said, ''No.'' I took that to mean yes and sailed for Italy the next day.
Woody Allen

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
Toni Morrison

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.
George Ade

Nothing is less sacrosanct than a mediocre book.
Helene Hanff

It's much more important to write than to be written about.
Gabriel Maria Marquez

Life is too noisy. Reading is a quiet time for the soul.
William Bennett

How can you write if you can't cry?
Ring Lardner

The writer's way is rough and lonely and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say cleaning ferryboats?
Dorothy Parker

Getting even is one reason for writing.
William Gass

To me, writing is a horseback ride into heaven and hell and back. I am grateful if I can crawl back alive.
Thomas Sanchez

Every great man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
Oscar Wilde

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.
Pete Hamill

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf (1927)

It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.
La Bruyere, Characters (1688) tr. Henri Van Laun

I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.
Moliere, The Ridiculous Precieuses (1659) tr. Donald M. Frame

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain

No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers and poets in contempt. They do it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question.
Saul Bellow

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.
Adlai E. Stevenson

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H. L. Mencken

Fuck the writers.
Frank Capra

Americans like fat books and thin women.
W.H. Auden

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that is too adorable, I'd rather have the money.
Dorothy Parker

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
Irvin S. Cobb

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere.
S.J. Perelman

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.
William Faulkner

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
Joyce Carol Oates

If you have someone on the set for the hair, why would you not have someone for the words?
Louis Malle
telling producers why he wanted John Guare around during the filming of ''Atlantic City''

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.
Woody Allen

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
Don Marquis

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Jules Renard

I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as the keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.
William Faulkner

...write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.
Ernest Hemingway

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.
Samuel Goldwyn
to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor

I don't know whether or not Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. But if he didn't, he missed the chance of a lifetime.
Samuel Johnson

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on a sports jacket and take off my brain.
Ben Hecht

What's all this business of being a writer? It's just putting one word after another.
Irving Thalberg

The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ''curiosity'' level.
Rejection slip for ''The Diary of Anne Frank''

Burn it, son, burn it. Fire is a great refiner.
Rejection slip for Harry Crews' manuscript of short stories

It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.
Rejection slip for George Orwell's ''Animal Farm''

These stories have trees in them.
Rejection slip for ''A River Runs Through It'' by Norman MacLean