Augusten Burroughs Quotes

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book.

I want to get off with the screenwriting.

I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.

I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.

I'm developing some screenplays at the moment with my Australian producer.

I've written a couple screenplays and half-finished plays.

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

I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.

I've written pilots. I wrote a movie.

I feel that one of the fields that I need to learn a lot is screenwriting. I used to write my own screenplays, but it's just that I remember that at that time, I was saying to myself, 'I wish one day I will meet a screenwriter that will help me because I feel that I need to learn.'

A producer friend of mine from film school had read some of my early screenplays - some experiments I had done to see how fast I could write something.

I've written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches - I know exactly how to do them. They're judged by set criteria that I know.

My approach to making movies is different than other people, because I just write a lot of screenplays. I'm constantly writing screenplays.

The first thing to look out for after your first big success are drugs and screenplays.

I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. It's all bullshit.

And I've got some screenplays and plays ready to dip into when I need to.

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.

With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."

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.

I have no desire to write anything for screen. That's a great talent.

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.

I didn't like writing just articles and things. So then I wandered around. I tried my hand at film and television and that was a worse fit because I don't really have a mind for that.

By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.