Tom Perrotta Quotes

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.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

When I first read the script a few years ago I thought it was one of the best written scripts I had ever read.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

If you get a script and it's really well written, that's always exciting.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.

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 lucky enough to have Aaron Sorkin write what I have to say.

Somebody wrote a script around us, but Dustin Abraham came with the best one.

By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does.

We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.

I want to write a film. I need to think of the right idea and focus on that; I love writing.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

It was really fun to start writing movies because you could actually take characters whose voice you enjoy writing in and have actual things happen to them for more than five minutes. It was really fun to thread it together.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

In my films writers are more important than actors.