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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't have a thing to do with picking a coach, and didn't want to. But I didn't think they'd pick one I didn't like.

t was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn't much left you could depend on.

Pictorial art is relating tones to create beauty - like chords of music - not the faithful copying of the model.

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.

So So Def has been one of the most successful and consistent labels in the game in the last 10 years.

The lowest budget U.S. films are ten times times better (than shooting in Tibet).

Fate makes us family. choice makes us friends.

In order to see Jesus, we first need to let him look at us!

When I'm in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I'm in a movie.

The lie that started it all.