I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.

I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.

I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.

Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Success in life could be defined as the continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals.

I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.

I think I can only help to expose percussion to all sorts of people. The balance between the lighter and more serious side is important.

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.

An eighty-nine year old kid from Boston playing a blues in New Orleans takes a lot of chutzpah.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

I'm used to politicians being angry with me, you know, because I don't work for them. I work for my viewers.

If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.