If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
William MonahanYou just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.
William MonahanThe old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
William Monahan[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time.
William Monahan