Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.

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.

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!

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

True nirvana will come when we enlighten the world of awareness and higher consciousness.

The real genesis is forbidden to me, vis-à-vis N´s inability to confess even the mildest transgressions.

When we have not what we love we must love what we have.

Bigger people beat up little people.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

Facts from paper are not the same as facts from people. The reliability of the people giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves.

The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.

In our eyes we should be up three to one but we're not

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

Japan's biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.