James L. Brooks famous quotes

04-17-2025

Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.
-- James L. Brooks

#Simple #Thinking #Complicated
I took some time out for life.
-- James L. Brooks

#Time #Life Time
I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.
-- James L. Brooks

#Sexy #Ideas #Marketing
You become so obsessed, and that's not a bad thing for a movie. Serve it with that sense that it's the whole world.
-- James L. Brooks

#World #Obsessed
A lot of things just aren't true any more.
-- James L. Brooks
What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.
-- James L. Brooks

#Mean #Doe #Actors
I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny.
-- James L. Brooks

#Comedy #Values
I have a lot of nightmares.
-- James L. Brooks

#Nightmare
The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.
-- James L. Brooks

#Writing #Omnipotence #Feelings
Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
-- James L. Brooks

#Dog #Hero #Hard Times
You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.
-- James L. Brooks

#Baby #Creativity #Numbers
I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.
-- James L. Brooks

#Moving #Character #News
Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!
-- James L. Brooks

#Appreciation #Kids #Alive
Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.
-- James L. Brooks

#Great Things
It never stops, accepting that fact is difficult. I took some time out for life.
-- James L. Brooks

#Time Management #Facts #Accepting
Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.
-- James L. Brooks
I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.
-- James L. Brooks

#Real #Thinking #Trying
Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.
-- James L. Brooks

#Media #Privacy
I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.
-- James L. Brooks

#Romantic Love #Thinking #Ideas
There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set quite appropriately and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. When you're directing, you don't need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do." And, you know, and I WOULD be there behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn't even aware of.
-- James L. Brooks

#Sorry #Trying #Directors

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