Tom Stoppard Quotes

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...

I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies.

'The Way of the Gun' I wrote in five days.

Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.

I finished 'Hell or High Water' and started writing 'Wind River' literally the next day.

I'd love to be involved in the process of adapting a book to a script, but that's simply not my job.

I've got a room full of scripts. They go to the ceiling. I can't even hardly walk into it anymore. Most are original, and there are some adaptations like 'Man's Fate.'

I really enjoyed writing the adaptation of 'Into The Woods.' I thought it was wonderful to not be the director, frankly. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

I don't think I write differently when I'm writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

Because [writers] Dan Weiss and David Benioff have done such a great job in adapting them, that's what we work with. It serves no purpose to anybody for actors to come onto a set with a well-thumbed copy of the source material and start querying why this or that line has been left out of the script. It's probably been left out for a good reason.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.

I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

Sometimes I find it tiresome to write actions and describe the scene in a very intricate way so that every crew member understands where we are going - that I can find a little bit long and tiresome. But dialogue is just all my life. There's no way I could ever be challenged, not challenged, but I'm always so happy to write dialogue.

I think about my films for a long time, maybe years, but I write them in days.

I started off writing TV adverts. I saw those as rehearsals for a feature film.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms.

Do you know how long it took me to write 'For a Few Dollars More'? Nine days.

The strangest thing about writing a sitcom, is never knowing if it will become anything but words on a page.

I don't think I'm the right man to adapt a book.

I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.