Pippa Evans Quotes

The whole thing of doing a TV series, I find it very daunting not knowing where the story's going.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

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

I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.

These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.

'The Full Monty' was my first feature script, and I wasn't that skilled at it.

A producer friend of mine from film school had read some of my early screenplays - some experiments I had done to see how fast I could write something.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

You never know what to expect when you're a writer visiting a movie set.

I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I have stories that I'd like to maybe one day consider directing, but you need a lot of time to write and put it together.

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

Sometimes I find it tiresome to write actions and describe the scene in a very intricate way so that every crew member understands where we are going - that I can find a little bit long and tiresome. But dialogue is just all my life. There's no way I could ever be challenged, not challenged, but I'm always so happy to write dialogue.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.