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

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.

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!

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

I never rehearse scenes with the whole ensemble, because I need to preserve some surprise. Instead, I work with the cast individually on their characters.

I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

The idea that all are children of God is not found in the Bible anywhere.

Life creates conditions conducive to life.

Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.

Have the backbone to go after what you want in life. It's too easy to settle.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.