A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

Some people have a gift for making you feel okay, just by the fact of their presence.

History is made not of facts set in stone but of the stories we tell.

A distant goal can be achieved day by day.

I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.

Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.

Having power and being in a position of power can really blur your judgement, and it's not always that clear.

Technology and violence are interdependent.

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.

Were I forced to describe this woman in one word, that word would be...herpes.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.