Alan Menken Quotes

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

I get so excited about reading a new script.

I'm just a sucker for a good script.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

One of the horribly frustrating things about writing feature films is the rules everyone applies and says, 'You have to do this by the end of the first act and by the end of the second act you must introduce this.' As if there were rules to life or telling a story or the ways things happen, which of course there aren't.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

How can you turn down Marks and Gran? Their scripts are so rich in texture.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

A good script makes our job a lot easier.

I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.

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

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

If you get a script and it's really well written, that's always exciting.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

When you write a script, you always think about what your heart is asking.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.