The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

The first step may be the hardest, but once you take action you create motion, which in turn builds momentum.

Antitrust law isn't about protecting competing businesses from each other, it's about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public.

I'll do anything for kids but I don't sign anything for grownups anymore.

Novelisation doesn't imply the truth. Readers are sophisticated enough to know that.

If some appalling disaster befalls, there's Always a way for the rich.

There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.

Live your life, experience something, and then you're going to have a lot of things to say. But if you hang around in Hollywood, then you're going to say the same thing as everyone else - nothing.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Fanaticism, to which men are so much inclined, has always served not only to render them more brutalized but more wicked.