Don DeLillo Quotes

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don’t ever rush into print.

I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

I love movie-making. I'm interested in writing and directing, and I've dabbled, but I haven't done anything I care to brag about. Yet.

To make a great film you need three things - the script, the script and the script.

I always write with images. I cannot write a book if I don't have images.

I used a video camera, and shot on film cameras at school and stuff, but I had a lot more training as a writer. I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.

In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

I like photography and I write; I also write music. One day I would like to direct [films] as well.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.

If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.