“I don’t have to play the song all the way to the very end – I use it while it’s good and while it’s cool and while it’s exciting, and then I get out.”

I’m very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I’ve never really considered myself a writer.

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it’s because I put the character first.

That’s how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It’s when a scene works emotionally and it’s cool and clever, then it’s great. That’s what you want.

Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

If I’ve made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I’ve accomplished something.

When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.

You can’t write poetry on the computer.

The good ideas will survive.

Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I’m not interested in, I can’t even feign interest.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

One thing I don’t understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they’ll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.

I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

I don’t judge my characters, and that’s my job not to judge them. It’s my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

Terrific. Now to win a larceny trial all we have to do is prove how the universe ends.

All’s well in the end, if you’ve only the patience to wait.

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

In everything we ought to look at the end.

One should never pursue the hazards of fortune to their very ends andit behooves all adventurers to treat their good luck with reverence, neither bothering nor upsetting it.

It is best, if possible, to deceive no one; for he that begins by deceiving others, will end by deceiving himself.

I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end

It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole.