It was a unique experience in several ways, because I don't think Sam [Fuller] had ever collaborated with another writer over his whole career.

I had a checkered early career, for sure, with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about.

What you care about [movie] is whether it's moving you, or whether you're caught up in it.

Hollywood, of course, is the city of illusion.

You can dress it up, but it comes down to the fact that a movie is only as good as its script.

Whereas to write, all you need is paper and an idea, so I felt that writing might be my stepping stone.

Self-awareness and self-esteem. Those aren't female issues, those are human issues.

Put simply, there are many people who want to make movies and very few opportunities for them to do it.

I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.

Consequently, it's so gratifying to then make a picture that's successful and gives you leverage to have better circumstances than you've ever had, before the next time out.

Consequently, their school [film-school ] was the school of life, and it was very much reflected in their work.

free fall to your quite smile to capture you and you propel me to death, all that we write destroys then heals

Complaining is never powerful because at the root of a complaint is powerlessness

A tattoo is graffiti on the temple of the body.

I don't miss anything about the 1960s, not really. I did it. It's like asking, 'Do you miss the fourth grade?' I loved the fourth grade when I was in it, but I don't want to do it again.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

Getting older is fine. There is nothing you can do to stop it so you might as well stay on the bus.

Law is the great civilizing machinery. It liberates the desire to build and subdues the desire to destroy.

Talking's just a nervous habit.

There is no relationship in life that comes with the promise of zero pain.

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.