All the animals come out at night.

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

Let's just shoot in black and white. Don't explain why. Have no reason for it. Just do it because it's interesting.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

One of the things that I do like about filmmaking is that you find out how to solve new problems.

Once you have a situation that is fresh, then you sort of believe in it and it becomes normal. So you do end up with protagonists that haven't been in other movies before.

Don't ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you.

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

We have more people in jail than any other country in Earth, disproportionately Latino and African-American.

Cotton candy. Like eating a cloud of diabetes.

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.

Even though I saw the executioner and the fire, I could not say anything but what I have said.

Every country has an aspect to it that rubs up people the wrong way.

To be pure in heart is to take no delight in cunning, but converse sincerely with men, and express nothing, by word or look, which is not felt in the heart.

I could see myself as a glitter-hippie.

As soon as we find a cure, we will utilize any of the donations to go toward providing medication to those who can't afford it. That is my goal.

The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."