An X-wing fighter flies like an airplane. If you look at the physics, it's actually quite impossible.

When a new writer comes onto a project, he'll make wholesale changes just to mark the territory or for greater credit.

I never stopped loving the deeper sciences, and I read as deeply into lay science as I can.

I try to keep up, and the scientific perspective is always part of my creative approach.

I'd wanted to be a writer since I was knee-high. Once I knew that books were written by people and didn't just happen, it was obviously that I would write them, too.

Directing offers you the hope that your vision will reach the screen, unmolested and intact. Therefore, it's tantalizing to all writers.

It is true that, with TV, a writer gets a great deal more respect.

For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.

You don't control whether your movies get made. You can't. All you can control is whether your draft is great. So, you write your great draft, as best as you can, and then move on to the next thing.

Making the right choices on the worlds we explore is going to be our biggest challenge.

I mean that much more than wiser beings from beyond the stars bringing us enlightenment or death or salvation, we are likely to find ourselves the wisest beings on the scene.

I would think twice about designing stuff for which there was no need and which didn't endure.

In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites.

Words are, quite simply, weapons. How a person or an act or a thought looks depends entirely upon how - and by whom - it is described.

It's just, you can get very complacent if you do the same thing all the time and especially the comedian, it gives me you know different things to react to and respond to, and it stimulates me.

No one is exempt from grief.

It's all about the script. Reality is key to me and less cutesy.

I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.

I've been a writer longer than I've been an actor. I wrote short stories like crazy when I was in high school and college. I worked in advertising before I moved to L.A. to pursue acting.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.