Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

Seeing someone reading a book you love is seeing a book recommending a person.

News Flash!All politicians arms are going to be lengthened so that they will be able to pat themselves on the back for doing a great job.

Number one" leaders never think about positions, but disposition.

He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself

We need to forgive ourselves and everyone else for NOT being perfect.

I had heard about how people struggle and how hard it is to get into acting. But I did not care because it's something I love.

I believe that we have more capability than any other creature to control our biological inheritance - and we do so most of the time.

Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

A high income job, a big house, nice cars, and lavish vacations don't mean you are rich, in fact it could mean exactly opposite

The key is to keep improving. I'm not there yet. I know I have to keep trying to improve and keep trying to get faster.