To make a great film, you need three things : the script, the script and the script.
– Alfred Hitchcock
A great script is absolutely essential, perhaps THE essential thing for a movie to succeed.
– Sydney Pollack
Once you crack the script, everything else follows.
– Ridley Scott
Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.
– Paul Thomas Anderson
You can dress it up, but it comes down to the fact that a movie is only as good as its script.
– Curtis Hanson
There’s nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.
– Richard Attenborough
The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.
– Raymond Chandler
Audiences are harder to please if you’re just giving them effects, but they’re easy to please if it’s a good story.
– Steven Spielberg
You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that’s it.
– Rita Mae Brown
I don’t think screenwriting is therapeutic. It’s actually really, really hard for me. It’s not an enjoyable process.
– Charlie Kaufman
I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.
– Tom Clancy
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
– Elmore Leonard
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright But everything I wrote, I thought was weak. and I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
– Francis Ford Coppola
I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker….But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.
– Paul Schrader
I don’t think screenplay writing is the same as writing. I mean, I think it’s blue printing.
– Robert Altman
It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.
– Will Shetterly
Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.
– Billy Wilder
Ensure that your script is watertight. If it’s not on the page, it will never magically appear on the screen.
– Richard E. Grant
Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.
– Robert Towne
I steal from every movie ever made.
– Quentin Tarantino
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t give up.
– Richard Bach
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
– Robert McKee
It’s a great euphoria when you reach that writing zone.
– Paul T. Scheuring
Coffee and screenwriting go hand in hand.
– Adrienne Posey
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
– William Goldman
