Amy Sherman-Palladino Quotes

TV writing - for me, at least - is half original voice and half an embodiment and a representation of the spirit of the actors you're writing for.

When you're writing a pilot, unless you already have an actor attached to the project, you're writing it with all the voices sort of in your head. Once you actually cast it, the actors become the voices of the characters, and you start to write for them and their strengths.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

I've got a particular way of writing novels, and that carries over into the way I write comics and games, too. I'm a news journalist by background, so I approach everything as reporting - I treat it as real, I ask the questions I'd ask in a real situation, and I let the characters speak for themselves.

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

When people ask me about my dialogue, I say, 'Don't you hear people talking?' That's all I do. I hear a certain type of individual, I decide this is what he should be, whatever it is, and then I hear him. Well, I don't hear anybody that I can't make talk.

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

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

I do a lot of improvising when I'm writing, and I work very hard on the scripts... they are written very much in an actor-friendly way.

As a director, you want to work with great writers.

Being a screenwriter for a comedy, you're writing for characters in them in their voice. I could write anyone.

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.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

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

One of the greatest things about 'Continuum' is how great the writing is; our writing room is one of the most talented ones I've ever had. It really helps me as far as character development because they paint a very descriptive picture of who the characters are while still letting us have freedom to put in our own ideas.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

It's often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.