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.

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.

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!

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

Respond to your inner instincts with enthusiasm.

To travel is to live. Breathe some life into your life and go outside!

And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.

Do not inquire he name if him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who's embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter

I hate to lose the constituency that I've worked with, but I've got 170,000 people to meet in my new district.

Anything can happen and it probably will.

Nuclear apocalypse-who do you need? Actors are probably not top of the list. What can I do for you? I can pretend to be somebody who can grow you some nice crops.

The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.

Be certain that he who has betrayed thee once will betray thee again.

In heaven, there is no judgment, but rather an opportunity to examine our lives-who we touched, the choices we made, and the consequences of those choices.