As much as I love period movies and especially more swashbuckling movies, I think that sometimes they tend to be, umm... it's hard for the audience to relate to them.

Its such an egotistical thing to be able to just stand there and say, Action! Its like being a little mini-god.

It's okay to lie as long as you reach a higher truth doing it.

Its as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

I worked as hard to write the worst film of the year as I did to write the best film of the year.

If Im in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?

I think test screenings with an audience are useful because they have no dog in the fight, they just say how they feel.

In exchange for ten years of being on top, I'm gonna end up in prison or I'm gonna end up dead, and there's something fascinating about that.

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyone else could do this better than you can.

Because I've been at it so long and very steadily, I have a lot of credits, but I probably have twice as many scripts that were never made for whatever reason.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking for them.

To shut your eyes is to travel.

I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had.

I know many Catholics love God with all their heart. I have genuine respect for anyone who truly has given their life to Christ. We read about Mother Teresa and what a wonderful example she was.

I love comic books. Since I was a kid, I've collected them.

We've always been in favor of improved wages for workers. When you have a strong middle class, they want to buy more stuff at Costco.

If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?

When I say the people around me, I mean the prisoners, the guards.

When you have a child, as anyone knows who has them, that's basically all you want to talk about.

I'm already 30! It doesn't really feel like a landmark. When I started out, my aim was to keep making records. Just because I've reached the 10th doesn't mean I'm going to rest on my laurels now!

You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.