Karen Allen Quotes

There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts.

The script - and a good one - tells you everything that you need to know.

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

It's a real challenge to complete a story arc and end up with a cool punchline in 120 characters.

At the end of the day you do have to write a short novel beforehand, called a script, before you can make a movie.

The most important thing is the script.

It's always the script that's going to lure me. And I don't really care about the part.

Scripts are what matter... if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don’t stand a shot.

The stitch of a book is its words.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

The problem with the screenplay is that it's not literature, and it's not a film. It's a very weird, technical kind of blueprint that will be absolutely transformed into something else that is not that, you know? Honestly, a screenplay is no literature.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

Read. Read. Read. Read many genres. Read good writing. Read bad writing and figure out the difference. Learn the craft of writing.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

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.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!