David Duchovny Quotes

Ensure that your script is watertight. If it's not on the page, it will never magically appear on the screen.

If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.

When you say the name Gilligan, you know who that is. If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail.

The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

If you have a great script and great dialogue, you don't need to improvise.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.

I've always found the script to be more of a skeleton, the template.

I try to write cinematically. Let me define what I mean by that. First of all, I try to write in a visual way so that the reader can watch a movie in their head. And it keeps moving. I try to structure the stories like a screenplay may be structured.

It always comes down to script and characters.

It all starts with a very solid, well-executed script, where the story is very clear and everybody is rowing in the same direction. That's always good; that's a constant.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.

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

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.