If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.

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.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands,

Poverty is a mental virus, even if one could get a million, the mindset will always kick in.

I liked rock music, I kind of moved into that sphere, somehow thinking that somewhere along the line I'd be able to put the two together. And I suppose I very nearly did with the Ziggy character.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

It looks like the thing that separates out the capable students from the really successful ones is not so much their knowledge...but their persistence at something.

Silence is not only never thirsty, but also never brings pain or sorrow.

A heroic nature is very Greek.

When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.

The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.

I don't want to lose too much of the mystery by hammering every detail to death.