John Huston Quotes

I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.

I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

The most joyful part of writing, for me, is when I am 90% there, and suddenly the story clicks into place, and things finally start to make sense.

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

I have the foundation to write, and then I go back and do research, and some of that might influence the recrafting of certain scenes.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.

What is useful about when there is a sort of pull-out to reveal moment going on is that it actually focuses the mind when you're writing the earlier scenes because you're thinking 'right, how do I? I can only show this amount of the room... I can only show these characters from the waist up because they've all got robot legs!' it's a challenge so it keeps you engaged on some level.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.

I write my scripts on a whim, without worrying about plot points and graphs.

You can be imaginative, you have the technology to convert your vision, you have the freedom to write the kind of stories you want to tell beyond the set formulas. Also, you have varied platforms to tell different kinds of stories.

Writing is so much about rhythm. If you've got another rhythm in the room, it spoils the rhythm of the words.

When I write, I write everything from a rhythm point.

When you sit down to write a film, you direct it in your head. If you are writing a scene, you are watching the scene. And maybe it's different when you are writing a novel because you are thinking of it in terms of being read. But films are only consumed one way - through the eyes and the ears.

If you think about writing a book, or when I did, it seems daunting, but when I began writing, it just started flowing.

I think you only need 2-3 good scenes in a film.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

Our vision is to break the projects into stories that must be told, stories that we would like to tell and stories that people go to movies for. If we can find great scripts that fit these three categories, we will go out and make a movie.

Visuals are compelling, but sometimes the only way to get your point of view and purpose across is through words. Great copy can be embedded in any medium, any technology.

I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.