Vince Gilligan Quotes

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.

Write the best book you can, the one that demands to be written, no matter what genre it is. Even a trend the trades tell you has gone stale can be revitalized by a superb piece of writing. It'll never be revitalized by someone jumping on a trend bandwagon.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

I never thought I was very good at developing material. I grew up at the BBC where they sent you scripts.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I like writing my own material - I'm pretty good at it.

I can't speak in too much detail about a book or story I'm working on because I find that it takes the energy out of my writing. When I begin to work, it's like a soda bottle that's been jostled before it's opened. There's a lot of pent up energy in there. I have to let it out slowly, carefully, so that I can turn it into a written work.

I despise writing in general, but yeah, I love writing the stuff that I direct.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

It's fun when you have a whole team of writers that really like writing for someone; you always end up with some really great lines.

What's important with writing is that it comes from a place you absolutely love. I'm writing for film and TV. In America, they call people like me 'multi-hyphenators.'

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

You have to go where the good writing is.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I really just sat down to write. I mean, I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

I'm always working on a few different stories at once, so there's always some really big coffee table book I'm carrying around.

You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.

The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher Mrs. Crandall gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I loved doing it. I started working seriously at becoming a writer when I was seventeen.