'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.
Adriana Trigiani
I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
Alice Hoffman
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.
Allison Anders
There is the cult of the actor and of the director, and there's even been the cult of the celebrity chef and gardener, but there has never been a cult of the screenwriter. But I'm happy about that because what I crave - in a completely venal way - is creative opportunities, not recognition.
Anthony McCarten
India needs better producers than screenwriters. No producer wants to invest in out-of-the way scripts.
Anurag Kashyap
When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.
Aravind Adiga
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
Beth Henley
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.
Callie Khouri
I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director.
Cameron Crowe
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Spike Lee is one of my biggest influences. What I love about Spike, other than he's just a fun guy to hang around, is that Spike is fearless. As much as people talk about him being politically outspoken, let's not forget that he's one of the best screenwriters, ever, in addition to being a visual master.
Cheo Hodari Coker
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.
Christopher Guest
There's a place for art in the world, but it can't be at the top of the list for a working screenwriter.
Christopher Markus
One of our jobs as screenwriters is to never lose sight of the character.
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!
Craig Mazin
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.
Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.
I look at myself more as a storyteller than a screenwriter, as pretentious as that may sound, but that's what really attracts me to TED Talks. For me, the really effective ones are being presented by expert storytellers.
Damon Lindelof
Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!
Dani Shapiro
And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.
David Benioff
Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.
I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe.
I don't think I'm the best screenwriter in the world. It's just important to me to write my movies so I'm personally invested in them.
Since I began making movies, I've always looked for screenwriters instead of going through the long and painful process of writing.
I'm a very slow screenwriter. It takes time for me to write a screenplay. Also, I feel it's not my strength.
I feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it's just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, 'I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.'
Even though I am in this weird position of being a semi-recognizable screenwriter, which isn't that common, at the same time, I'm not an actress. I'm pretty isolated.
I grew up in the Midwest; you don't know any screenwriters. It didn't seem like a realistic career possibility.
My story is comic because I've spent vast amounts of effort trying to become a Hollywood screenwriter and made no direct effort on making my son a movie actor.
My daughter has seen the transition from struggling screenwriter to successful picture book author, and she's enjoyed it very much because she's a wonderful little kid. And she's always believed in her daddy.
I like to write, and I would love to be a screenwriter one day and a director.
There are a lot of women screenwriters, but they are obviously outnumbered by men. And it still is a very much male-dominated industry.
Writers - all writers, even screenwriters - like to make their mark. I don't think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers.
I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.
The absolute base-level thing that you do as a new screenwriter is send out query letters. Literally, you just say, 'Hi, Mr. So-and-So,' and you give them a one-sentence description of one of your scripts. You send it out to a list of people you found on the Internet.
Very often, things that people may think come from the writer, very often don't. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to making a movie. When you hear a line of dialogue that sounds kind of tinny, it's pretty easy to cite the screenwriter. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into making a movie.
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.
My dad, who is a screenwriter, showed me all these great movies. He showed me 'E.T.' when I was 2-years-old, and I just kind of progressed from there. It was also my brother. We'd always watch movies together, and he'd do these voices and he'd always want to do skits and he'd come up with stuff with me.
My dad is a screenwriter, so he always used to watch movies for inspiration when I was a baby. I would watch movies with him, I guess, in the background.
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.
I am happy that I'm a better novelist than a screenwriter.
The simple idiot's advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, 'Write good.'
To have someone like Clint Eastwood come along and shoot your first draft as written is just any screenwriter's dream. And Clint is very straightforward. If it's good enough to get his attention, it's good enough to produce.
'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.
When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.
What I do have to get across is the truth of the moment within the given scene. It's my job, as a director and screenwriter, to create the environment in which all those moments will come together eventually.
When I write a screenplay - and I think it's one of the reasons why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter - I'm not thinking of it in terms of words on a page; I'm thinking in terms of visual images - basically, a comic book. I'm thinking of it in a series of shots.
It was okay but then I found myself in that position of being merely a screenwriter. And you are merely the screenwriter, and there's no way around it. You don't have the same clout as the director.
As a screenwriter, you are so used to things going in directions that you wouldn't have taken, so to be able to say, 'This is how I intended it, this is how I want to shoot it, and these are the decisions that I'll live by,' I think directing is a logical conclusion of mine.
As a screenwriter, you always have frustrations. It's just the nature of the job, and you have to live with it. Your vision is not going to be the same as the director's vision. It doesn't mean one is better or worse; it means they're different.
