I don't think it's very useful to open wide the door for young artists; the ones who break down the door are more interesting.

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!

Then Diana puts too many murders into [her stories]. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.

When you're all dressed up and no place to go.

I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.

I believe I went through a divorce. My relationship with Ellen is no less significant as a marriage than my relationship to Coley.

Films should be for everybody.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

If I gave America any kind of hope or any kind of inspiration, I really want to say thank you for allowing me to continue doing that week after week.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

I've never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn't be done better by fifty people.

I'm right now standing inside Hamilton-Selway Fine Art as an artist, as a philanthropist, as a child of God, and more importantly as a human being.