You think it's a blessing to know what God wants? I'll tell you what he wants. He wants to push me over! Can't he see what's inside of me? All my sins.

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!

Your life is awash in waves of love in each moment. Open your eyes to the currents around you and bathe in the bliss.

They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962

Where does the past go when it changes?

The last birthday that's any good is 23.

The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.

I liked the monsters, I liked them because I couldn't understand how something so scary could also be so good. It got me thinking as a very early age, and I had a lot of rehearsal.

I'll keep us out of war with Oklahoma!

My whole goal was to be able to work in television and film and maintain a normal life, never be in a tabloid.

I am very lucky, I have a very tight group of friends and a very supportive family, and to this date no-one has ever sold a story on me.

It wouldn't be me if I didn't get a little nasty.