Nick Harkaway Quotes

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

I always write the script by myself.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.

I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

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

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out.

I think I would like to write screenplays, books, really anything.

In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

It really was total heaven to be a writer. As a model or actor you are employed on someone's whim. As a writer, you are in control.

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

As I was writing 'Insidious 3' I started to fall in love with the characters and the story. I became very possessive of it and I didn't want someone else to do it.

When I write a movie, I write it for me.

It was interesting to write ad films and scripts for TV shows before I moved on to writing a feature film. That helped me grow as a writer, and I also found out how long I could sit in front of a computer and see something through.

The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.

What's important with writing is that it comes from a place you absolutely love. I'm writing for film and TV. In America, they call people like me 'multi-hyphenators.'

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