Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.

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.

A Guardian is only as strong as its Muse.

If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.

She was tired of being the one who cried.

Whattaya mean you ain’t no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

Who gives an empire, by the gift defeats All end of giving; and procures contempt Instead of gratitude.

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!

Westward the star of empire takes its way.

No one can take away the days that we conquered.

Shh! Don't talk with your mouth full.