Anything that doesn't bore me I think is doable because it's keeping me awake.

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!

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

And part of that is, what is the point of having children if you don't have the privilege of bringing them up?

The longer we stay in Hell, the more we become attached to it.

If you want more love in your life, you could not find a better gift to give yourself, a friend, or a lover.

like any Irish mother, I am scar tissue to the bone.

Is there a better wrestling villain on TV these days than CM Punk? Arguable question but for my sauce, Punk is right there at the top of the heap with a handful of his peers.

Most damning of phrases: He meant well.

We are like flowers always reaching up towards some shred of light. I find this wondrous, nearly magical, certainly brave.

I watch Glenn Beck and he's taught me well. Progressive is the new word for Communist