Lawrence O'Donnell Quotes

The success of the movie industry comes from the story. And the story comes from somebody putting something down on paper.

I want to write a script, but before that, I am planning to compile a book of short stories.

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.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Screenwriting is still a challenge for me. It's more technical than creative. You have to be a very good journeyman plumber and put the proper parts together. Then, if you can still inject a little bit of something worthwhile, you have done as much as can be expected.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

You have to learn how to write each book.

I write through improvisation. I never card out a movie. You know how people will outline or card? I don't do that. I tend to start with an idea and go.

It always comes down to script and characters.

Writing a script consumes so much of time.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

I'm a big believer that the script is your bible.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

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.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.