Screenwriting Quotes

“Karl Marx:"Religion is the opiate of the masses."

Carrie Fisher:"I did masses of opiates religiously.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“Plot is a by-product of Character.”
― Dan Joseph Decker, ANATOMY OF A SCREENPLAY THIRD EDITION

“I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I like the idea of sitting in the dark and knowing that I created the thing on screen, that it’s my story, but, like, no-one else has to know it was me. Does that make sense?”
― Melissa Keil, Life in Outer Space

“All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“The symptoms of a writer who hasn’t found their way clear of the needs of Self yet are easy to spot. I should say the symptoms are easy for everyone else to spot, that is, and not so easy for the writer themself to see. You’ll see a writer who does not trust the characters to speak and move on their own, but has to puppeteer them; a writer who does not trust the reader to understand what’s written. One who must insert parentheticals in various forms to explain the work to the reader; flashbacks to explain; big black blocks of text on the page to explain; question-and-answer dialog between characters who aren’t in a courtroom; walk-and-talk characters with their mouths full of dialog of what the story is about; too many stage directions that make the script read like a novel…”
― Dan Joseph Decker, ANATOMY OF A SCREENPLAY THIRD EDITION

“Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.”
― Darlene Craviotto, An Agoraphobic's Guide to Hollywood: How Michael Jackson Got Me Out of the House

“All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“It's an enormous wall that's built between you and your dreams. And if every day, you just chip away... It may take ten years, but eventually you just might see some light.”
― Edward Burns

“When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.

In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.

Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.”
― John Crowley, Novelty: Four Stories

“Vulnerability is the portal to feeling. Feeling is the portal to strength.”
― A.D. Posey

“La cosa più difficile quando si scrive è sapere che cosa scrivere”
― Syd Field

“Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.”
― Dave Barry, I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood

“I don't feel that every antagonist or villain needs to be redeemed in a story.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Yes, of course the audience has to relate to your characters, but they don’t need to approve of them.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“I was always bad at reading scripts. Back then, I’d be offered millions of dollars to do movies and barely crack the first few pages. I’m embarrassed to admit that now, given that these days I’m writing scripts myself and it’s like pulling teeth to get actors to respond. Maybe they feel how I used to feel: that in a life of fun and fame and money, reading a script, no matter the size of the number attached, feels all too much like school.

The universe will teach you, though. All those years I was too this, too that, to read a script, but last year I wrote a screenplay for myself and was trying get it made until I realized that I was too old to play the part. Most fifty-three-year-olds have worked their shit out already, so I needed to hire a thirty-year-old. The one I chose took weeks and weeks to respond, and I couldn’t believe how rude his behavior was.”
― Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

“A storyteller's form of healing [is] being a counselor, and healing people with ideas, with stories and kind, loving guidance.”
― Sonia Choquette, The Psychic Pathway: A Workbook for Reawakening the Voice of Your Soul

“If a filmmaker has no originality, what's the difference between a filmmaker and a photocopier!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules.
Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“It’s important to underline that a five-act structure isn’t really different to a three-act structure, merely a detailed refinement of it.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Simply put, five acts are generated by inserting two further act breaks in the second act of the traditional ‘Hollywood’ paradigm. The first and last acts remain identical in both forms.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“This book won’t make you a better writer. No one book will. But as part of something bigger—the steady, solid, consistent thrum of practice; the belief that study and application are important; and perhaps above all the understanding that if a writer’s job is to explore truth, then the least they can do is first seek it out in their craft.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“…following the conventions of form didn’t inhibit Beethoven, Mozart and Shostakovich. Even if you’re going to break rules (and why shouldn’t you?) you have to have a solid grounding in them first.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“All great artists – in music, drama, literature, in art itself – have an understanding of the rules whether that knowledge is conscious or not.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Delacroix countered the fear of knowledge succinctly: ‘First learn to be a craftsman; it won’t keep you from being a genius.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Three-dimensional characters…do change; their purchase is deeper. They have both a want and a need, and they are not necessarily the same thing.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Every compelling story provides a new status quo.”
― DB Thakuri, HEADWATERS OF SCREENWRITING: The Art of Crafting Original Screenplays

“The artists tell stories to seek the possible version of harmony in the world through emotional transformation.”
― DB Thakuri

“The business of making moving
pictures is the art of moving audiences.”
― Lawrence J. Kurnarsky, The Story of the Story: How to Kidnap Your Audience

“The biggest takeaway from my long-distance relationship with Floyd Byars was that I optioned an original screenplay he had co-written with his writing partner, Laurie.
Another takeaway was a case of crabs picked up on our only vacation together in Zihuatanejo, Mexico.
I noticeda crab in my eyelashes when I was in the airplane bathroomon my way back to JFK. I feared these little critters might be other places as well, so I spent the next four hours squirming in my seat, itchy and miserable. On the taxi ride home, I made the driver stop at an all-night pharmacy so I could buy a bottle of Kwell.
But despite the footsies and the crabs, I liked the premise of his (their)Making Mr. Rightscript.”
― Susan Seidelman, Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls