Let's just shoot in black and white. Don't explain why. Have no reason for it. Just do it because it's interesting.

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.

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!

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

You saw where I come from. No matter what I do or how I act, I'll always be the scum of the earth. I am who I am, and there's nothing you or anybody else can do to change that.

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.

Success is having a flair for the thing that you are doing knowing that is not enough that you have got to have hard work and a sense of purpose.

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

Slavery was incredibly prosperous for some people, at that time. It was not a bad business plan, but it was terrible and inhumane. But as a business it worked.

What the devil possessed me to reply 1. ... e5?? I compltely forgot that Spassky, like Spielmann in the past, very much likes to play the King's Gambit.

Buddhism is not just going to temple, being at a ceremony and dressing up. That is the church of Buddhism. Esoteric Buddhism is to move beyond this world.

You spoil your horse, Halt said. Will glanced at him. You spoil yours. Halt considered the thought, then nodded. That's true.

The truly important things in life - love, beauty, and one's own uniqueness - are constantly being overlooked.

I learned to keep at a certain distance from things - and to make myself a little bit invisible while I observed and understood them.