J. K. Simmons Quotes

My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

I've written plenty of scripts that sucked.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

The simple idiot's advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, 'Write good.'

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

I started out working as a script editor and storyliner.

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

I read a lot of scripts, so I know by page 25 if I like it or not.

When I first read the script a few years ago I thought it was one of the best written scripts I had ever read.

Some of the material out there - I don't want to say that it's all bad - but there's a lot of bad stuff out there. You just continue reading scripts, and eventually you find something you connect with.

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.

The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

Reading a script is usually as exciting as reading a boilerplate legal document, so when you read one that makes you feel as if you're seeing the movie, you know it's something different.