Clark Gregg Quotes

You're always looking for good scripts and when they're not always forthcoming you go mad.

My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.

I feel like some sort of fiction-writing hobo, jumping trains and always hoping I'll find a good place to start a fire in the next town. And I keep having these panicky episodes where I corner my husband and rant at him: 'I don't have anywhere to write! I can't write! I don't have a place to write!'

My stories are never quite good enough.

L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don't know why. On many levels, it's such a thankless occupation.

You never meet other screenwriters because it's such a lonely profession.

I remember watching Quentin Tarantino accept an Academy Award for screenwriting for 'Pulp Fiction.' If I'd known then that 15 years later one of his movies would again be nominated for an Oscar and I'd be in it - that would be pretty crazy.

I'd been acting since I was a teenager. I'd come to the point where I was writing my own movies of the week for TV. That was fun.

I think it'd be cool to be in film and television, but I never thought that would happen.

I want to do everything. I just want variety and longevity. I've never filmed a movie before, I want to do that. I want to come back to theater at some point. But I was in New York for like ten years, grinding. I'm ready to be in L.A. for a little while, and really experience film and television.

I was 20 when I moved to Los Angeles. I went on probably 600 commercial auditions and couldn't book any of them.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

I worked with fantastic actors, fantastic directors. People I would never otherwise have met. Was I limited? Yes. Did I use it as I could have? No. But I was always ambivalent about Hollywood and what I wanted. And ambivalence in our business is no good for success.

I have done a lot of work in Hollywood myself. I worked in television for roughly 10 years, from the mid-'80s to mid-'90s. And I was on staff at a couple of shows. I did some feature films, including originals and adaptations.

I definitely caught the acting bug, but that lasted for about two seconds when I found my way to L.A. and found that my talents were better suited behind the cameras.

I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the audition process, but there's something that really turned me off initially when I was younger, to auditioning. The idea that I couldn't get to the person that was actually making the film really frustrated me.

When I was in New York, a lot of my friends were studying filmmaking and would bring their scripts to me, as I was a good script doctor. I would read their scripts and make corrections to them for $20 per script and was fascinated by films.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.

That's where the theatre of dreams is, over in L.A.; it's the land of opportunity for actors, and to go over there with a good team behind you and have a part you want to audition for really makes it a joy.

I've done a movie and a TV series, and someday I'd like to do a successful movie and a successful TV series. That would be nice.

I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.

I began my career performing in plays and musicals in New York, but by the mid-'80s, opportunities in Hollywood beckoned and I made the move to Los Angeles. It was a good decision. Work took off, but most important, I met my family out there - my husband, Bill, and the children we would adopt: Elijah, Mae-Mae, and Aron.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

You've probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike.

For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do.