It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it’s the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success. – David Benioff
Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote. – David Benioff
A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter. – David Benioff
With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it’s more a polite suggestion. – David Benioff
I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover. – David Benioff
If you’re writing a screenplay for a feature, you don’t have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff. – David Benioff
I don’t type my sentences on an arena’s pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans – I don’t feel pressure to please a crowd. – David Benioff
I can’t measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world’s most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born. – David Benioff
Sometimes I get jealous when I’m reading a great book by a younger writer. But ‘White Tiger’ is so good, I almost forgot to hate Aravind Adiga. – David Benioff
‘Troy’ is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not ‘The Iliad’ alone. ‘The Iliad’ begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script. – David Benioff
‘The 25th Hour’ came out of the decision – a really very conscious decision – that I needed a story set within a compressed time frame because that would help focus the story. – David Benioff
But in a 24-hour day, the 25th hour is also the impossible hour, an hour that doesn’t exist, that can only be created by the imagination. – David Benioff
And I didn’t grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal – to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn’t have the novels, maybe I’d be much more frustrated by not having directed yet. – David Benioff
‘Game Of Thrones’ was too big a canvas for a movie, but ‘Dirty White Boys’ is like a great old Western: there’s so much compression, and it’s so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting. – David Benioff
I don’t like extremely long movies. I tend to get a bit impatient. There are definitely exceptions, like ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ but for the most part, I feel that movies should usually be shorter and not longer. – David Benioff
It’s always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don’t have a good ending, it’s the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of ‘The Kite Runner,’ and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes. – David Benioff
I think, in a weird way, the reason I was drawn to screenwriting and the reason I really love doing it is because I love writing dialogue. – David Benioff
Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices – and in particular, difficult cuts. – David Benioff
