Anthony Hopkins Quotes

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

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.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

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

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.

My stories are character driven.

I worked in script development, many years ago, and read a lot of scripts. Between that and the scripts I've read as an actor, and I'm a writer as well, I think I have a pretty good sense about whether the bones of a story are there and whether the structure is intact.

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.

Sarah Phelps is such an incredibly detailed writer. She's famous for bringing literature to life, like Dickens and Agatha Christie.

I was trained in storytelling by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, and Larry Hama. Doesn't make me a genius, and there really isn't anything fancy about the stage direction in my scripts.

I get attracted to projects because of the script or the idea and the basic character.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.