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.

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.

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

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.

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 must endure willingly for the fulfillment dreams

You are...the embodimentof immediate good karma.The equalizer between bottomfeeders and the sanctimoniouscogs in the system.

I don't think you need to sound like from where you're from. But I think there is something magical and powerful about encompassing something fully and singularly.

It is well for us that, amidst all the variableness of life, there is One whom change cannot affect; One whose heart can never alter, and on whose brow mutability can make no furrows.

NAFTA, signed by her [Hillary Clinton's] husband, is perhaps the greatest disaster trade deal in the history of the world.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.

I'll play for a couple of hours and then before you know it, it's time to go on stage. It takes away any nervousness and anxiety I might have about the big crowd out there.

If you spend enough time with yourself in silence, you'll be surprised what goes through your head.