Joss Whedon Quotes

They always say, doing what I do for a living, write what you know and then people will respond to it. I luckily had a very charming, lovable mom who I think everybody could see bits and pieces of their mom in. All I had to do was write a character that was like my mom, and it made my life easier.

I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.

There was Uncle Ken of mine about whom I wrote a lot of stories. I can always write stories about uncles and aunts and distant relatives. They have to be distant, though; otherwise, you'll be in trouble.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

I think that, every individual you invent in narrative work, you have to have some root in who that person is. That may be an aspect of yourself; it may be an aspect of something that you like, that you don't like. It may be an aspect that you wish you had. Maybe something you admire in another person.

I would love to write a screenplay for 'Badlands' one day. I don't think I could ever have the patience to do it; I don't even have the patience to write songs. I write some of the shortest songs ever because I don't have the patience.

With Erin [from Paper Girls], I wanted to show what she might look like when she's 40, and I wanted it to feel authentic. In terms of inspiration I ended up using my wife for a lot of it. Just to kind of to give me almost an anchor so that I would be invested in making this character real.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

A series is a big deal, and there are a lot of people out there writing stuff that don't know what art is.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

There are vast differences between scripts and stories, of course. Few fiction writers would want to give up the opportunity to explore how the minds of their characters work, or to set aside the opportunity to provide necessary background exposition in a succinct fashion.

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

I once made the mistake of writing a story with David Corbett. The man smoked me. He can delineate the character and personality of an accordion in three strokes. I didn't even know accordions had character. This act of generosity and wisdom from a very good writer will help anyone who is staring at a blank page, any day, any time. Highly recommended.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene.

[Noah Hawley] just a fantastic writer. It's always about the script, it's always about the book; it always is. If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage. That's what attracted me to him first and foremost.

Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.

You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

If you just want to be a writer, I don't care, for pitching, for writing dialogue, you should take an improvisation class. It's super important.