I get bored very easily. I find most movies boring. I go to movies and ask, "How do they stay awake making this?"

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!

Spiritual practices performed in the middle of our mundane days bring us into the presence of an astonishing God.

You really don't know a person until you spend some time in their panties.

I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position I'd have done the same.

Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. I used to hate that.

it is far better to appreciate and not to possess, than to possess and not to appreciate.

Those who the gods would make rich and famous on TV, they first drive mad.

Im not trying to do conceptual art.

The amount of time that a young girl spends wearing pink will be inversely proportional to her future income.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book!