That's just my disposition - to create a situation where you have to come up with something.

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!

All of life is a test.

Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.

Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?

The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me.

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

Sometimes we don't appreciate Prayer until we have to go through something!

I just think that this whole issue of creating potential human life, not to give life, but to give the scientists a bit more of a leg-up, is fraught with danger.