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

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.

I've been doing a bit of screenwriting and producing, and even a bit of directing.

I started acting when I was really young. I knew I wanted to be in the industry in other ways. I knew that I wanted to do more than just act. I don't know that I knew it was screenwriting, but I just knew that I wanted to be involved.

Filmmaking is a very complex form - ya know, acting, lighting, screenwriting, storytelling, music, editing - all these things have to come together.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

I wanted to do screenwriting. That's what I went to school for, but my major was overfilled, and when I got 'The Daily Show', I was a semester away from officially starting my major, so I never started that in particular.

I don't mind doing scripted material. It's actually kind of a relief, because improvising is a little bit like screenwriting on your feet.

I had always been interested in screenwriting, ever since I could write things down as a child. Obviously, I started as an actor, professionally, but screenwriting was always something that I had a great interest in.

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.

As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.

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

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.

I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.

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.

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

Screenwriting is still a challenge for me. It's more technical than creative. You have to be a very good journeyman plumber and put the proper parts together. Then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you have done as much as can be expected.

Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I've read a bunch of screenwriting books over the years and, to be honest, they're mostly pretty crappy.

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

People, certainly in the U.K., look down on screenwriting as an art form, but I love the discipline of it. Next to the bagginess of novel writing, it almost feels like a martial art.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

Working at Pixar has been like my graduate school for screenwriting.

I majored in screenwriting and playwriting in school - and wanted to make films as a career. But when I directed my first short in college - which was called 'Extras' - I lost thousands of dollars and made an unsatisfying and incomplete film.

I was a screenwriting major at Georgetown, and I was in class with some really strong writers like Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote 'The Dark Knight' with Chris, his brother. He wrote 'The Prestige,' the story for 'Memento.'

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

Even with college, the reason I wanted to go so badly is because I wanted to major in film. I want to take screenwriting classes and learn more about behind the scenes stuff, because I love people like Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig who are able to write a lot of their own material and be so involved in everything they do.

It's a Hollywood screenwriting notion that change comes because of one epic, soul-crushing event... What's more common is that the slow decay of the nonevents of your life build up until you can't take it anymore.