I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

Almost every other Western in the last ten years has failed, since Dances with Wolves.

And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.

With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.

But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.

I really liked Carrie a lot. That was one of Brian De Palma's best movies.

I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.

It's hard enough to get any movie made, and when you take on these tough genres - and I've done it a couple times - it just makes the whole struggle more.

Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.

You don't manifest dreams without taking chances.

It is difficult to trust someone not raised to doctrine.

Words never change. What changes is how one interprets them.

The definition of Ar-Rahman: The fact that we only take from Allah and He only gives

She promised to be good. She wasn't.

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Can those entrusted with the gravest authority set any example save that of the sternest obedience to the law?

I think you have to play your own game and sometimes people don't realise that the play-maker runs the most kilometres on the pitch!

One should read Borges more.