The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.

I always wanted to make movies no matter what. It's true. No matter how I was getting to do it, that's what I wanted to do.

Desperate affairs require desperate remedies.

Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.

If princes and kings were not exalted they might be overthrown.

The romance of the old West vanished so fast and so few ever did anything with it. Does it make you realize the importance of Art and how the main knowledge of history is through Art alone?

Be humble, believe in yourself, and have the love of the world in your heart.

The team that is the most focused and executes the best is the team that wins. That's usually the team that can handle the pressure of the situation.

Los Angeles is peopled by waiters and carpenters and drivers who are there to be actors.

A good diet is the most powerful weapon we have against disease and sickness.