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 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.

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.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

When my heart is better, less shrunken, I will throw her out there to love again, without hesitation, even knowing what we know.

Being single, I thought would be fun, but it is terribly boring. And I am a romantic, but only when I am in love. I can't force it otherwise.

It's become very popular in contemporary films to have the twist ending.

Buttons ... check. Dials ... check. Switches ... check. Little colored lights ... check.

I'm always careful to say that I changed everything I found.

We live in the world our questions create.

I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep!

Samples are kind of my instrument of choice.

People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don't, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?

It is wisdom to think upon anything before we execute it.