I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game'.

You have to keep surprising your audience.

I always have humour in my action movies. I think characters that make jokes under fire are more real. It somehow helps put you in their shoes.

The only way you can stay on top is to remember to touch bottom and get back to basics.

Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.

An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring.

I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit.

Once I started selling scripts for a great deal of money - action scripts, no less, which people tend to pooh-pooh anyway - then I started to get some backlash. Which I didn't mind.

I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

Let your story grow. Let it surprise you, and it will certainly surprise your readers.

Large families are communities unto their own.

You are what you think. Before you succeed physically, it had been done mentally. The hometown of both victory and defeat is the mind of a person.

It never ceases to amaze me how much people talk about relationships, think about them, read about them, ask about them - even get in them without a clue how to move them forward.

It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together.

My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn't divorce God, but I'm quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it's a wounded faith.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

"Never stop. Never settle." I believe in this message.

When you forget that you need Allah, He puts you in a situation that causes you to call upon him. And that's for your own good.