Its such an egotistical thing to be able to just stand there and say, Action! Its like being a little mini-god.

It's okay to lie as long as you reach a higher truth doing it.

Its as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

I worked as hard to write the worst film of the year as I did to write the best film of the year.

As much as I love period movies and especially more swashbuckling movies, I think that sometimes they tend to be, umm... it's hard for the audience to relate to them.

If Im in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?

I think test screenings with an audience are useful because they have no dog in the fight, they just say how they feel.

In exchange for ten years of being on top, I'm gonna end up in prison or I'm gonna end up dead, and there's something fascinating about that.

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyone else could do this better than you can.

Because I've been at it so long and very steadily, I have a lot of credits, but I probably have twice as many scripts that were never made for whatever reason.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking for them.

We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.

We may our ends by our beginnings know.

People are saying, "Oh my God, Saudi Arabia has changed." It's a contradiction. Do you want us to lead, or do you want us to play a supporting role?

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.

I dream of an art of balance, of quietness, something analogous to a good armchair.

The linear-programming was - and is - perhaps the single most important real-life problem.

Would you hurt a woman worst, aim at her affections.

The atonement was an intimate, personal experience in which Jesus came to know how to help each of us.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.