Tony Gilroy Quotes

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business.

The most despised sector of Hollywood are the writers. A good writer is quickly promoted to a 'concept man' - and then a producer - because he's too valuable to simply be a writer.

I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

You never meet other screenwriters because it's such a lonely profession.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to.

It was interesting to write ad films and scripts for TV shows before I moved on to writing a feature film. That helped me grow as a writer, and I also found out how long I could sit in front of a computer and see something through.

I don't aspire to direct like many actors. I would aspire most likely to do some writing, but I haven't had a chance to do that.

I got it into my head that I was going to be starring in movies that I wrote, so that's what I did. I stopped acting in all things, and I wrote my first script, which was optioned a week after I finished it.

I didn't write to become a director, which many people do.

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

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.

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.

With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

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

I've written several pilots that haven't gone, so that's why you haven't seen any.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

I've sold scripts in the past, and also a TV pilot that didn't get made, to Fox. But yeah, I've been writing for a while.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

I've written pilots. I wrote a movie.