There's no escape. I'm God's only man.

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!

Because sure enough, the more you try to eradicate those limiting thoughts from bouncing around in your head, those negative thoughts are going to be bouncing around in your head more and more!

You can hide things from the world, but you can never hide things from time.

When the State withers, humanity flowers.

Either we win this election or we're going to lose our country, because 4 more years of [Barack] Obama, you can't take it.

There's a lot of meth [in Bisbee]. So there's an ex-cop-car Tahoe and a BE DRUG FREE van parked right in front of my house.

A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.

Radio is paid by advertising. They decide what songs to play that'll keep people listening. And that's what promoters and the Classic Rock people do.

Language is a living thing

Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.

Why Paris? Paris needs no reason. Paris is its own reason.