Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

What good is intuition if your heart gets in the way of hearing it?

It is a misery to be born a pain to live a trouble to die.

A hard beginning makes a good ending.

I would say 90 percent of the stuff we do is technical anyway. If you look at a two-hour training day, 12 minutes are probably spent running or gaining fitness.

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems.

I'm very attracted to Indians.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

The world is like a great empty dream. Why should one toil away one's life?

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.