"If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage." - Samuel Fuller
"To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script." – Sir Alfred Hitchcock
"All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story. And without story, you have no screenplay." - Syd Field
"All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant." – Robert McKee
"Screenplays are... invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art." — Paul Schrader
"The easiest thing to do on earth is not to write." — William Goldman
"The secret... is short sentences, small words, and big pictures." — William Kelley
"The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement." - Raymond Chandler
"You know, my problem with most screenwriting is it is a blueprint. It's like they're afraid to write the damn thing. And I'm a writer. That's what I do. I want it to be written. I want it to work on the page first and foremost. So when I'm writing the script, I'm not thinking about the viewer watching the movie. I'm thinking about the reader reading the script." - Quentin Tarantino
"Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?" - David Mamet
"As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are." - Quentin Tarantino
"Give me a good script, and I'll be a hundred times better as a director." - George Cuckor
"The script is what you`ve dreamed up - this is what it should be. The film is what you end up with." - George Lucas
"The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything." - Ewan McGegor
"A dramatic writer should never tell anything he can show." - Nunnally Johnson
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach
"Scripts are what matter... if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don’t stand a shot." - Tim Bevan
"I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair." - Scott Frank
"[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that." - James L. Brooks
"Nobody knows anything... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows sfor certainty what's going to work. Every time out it;s a guess and, if you'r lucky, an ducated one." - William Goldman
