Nobody has shot a strip club in black and white in a long time.

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.

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.

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!

The word of God warns us of every scheme of wickedness.

No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.

You can have a wedding at Fenway Park.

I can't stand being stagnant. Every day is a new opportunity to achieve something, even on a small scale.

It is only occasional that talent becomes genius - radiating sparks, brilliance, energy, and charismatic magnetism... such a talent was Janis Joplin.

I actually like talking.

Too low they build who build below the skies.

I think Mozart, like you, is an example of someone who has the gods moving through him, and his religion was creation.

When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.

You can be deprived of your money, your job and your home by someone else, but remember that no one can ever take away your honor.