Writer Quotes

I like movies that pop, that have a little bit of candy on, that freedom to have a little bit of extra fun, but are rooted in real behaviour. Rooted in cause and effect, never violating reality.

I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I'm supposed to.

I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell.

I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.

I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.

I don't like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.

I can't imagine directing from someone else's script.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Different people work different ways.

Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.

Corporations are like countries now, there's a king, there are serfs, there's a court, basically everything but moats. They're feudal societies, and there are good ones and bad ones.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?

When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.

The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

Eternity is not something that begins after you're dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.