“Anything you make has its own wavelength and its own sound. It’s like a tuning fork, until the things that resonate are correct for it.”

As television is learning some of the movies’ great tricks, movies are taking what’s good from TV.

Love scenes are the hardest things in the world and if you enjoy them, that’s wonderful, because nobody making them sits there and goes, ‘Let’s do that again tomorrow.’

What happens is that the experience of writers working together and the idea of creative collaboration is so delightful, but it has been relegated to TV.

Maybe it will all become one big thing, with smart, talented people who love a thing, helping each other be better.

Adaptation is always the same process for me, which is some version of throwing the book at the wall and seeing what pages fall out.

It is trying to imagine, remember the story, read it, put it down, and then write sort of an outline without the book in front of you with some hope that what you like about it will be filtered and distilled out through your memory and then that will be similar to what other people like about it.

The idea of starting with that Kanye [West] song is declarative. It says, “This is the kind of story we’re telling.”

I think people underestimate the value of collaboration, especially for writers.

Sometimes you see auteur TV shows and movies, and those are great.

I have now become so infatuated with television. I think television has become elegant.

Let there be a wide breadth of possible ways to create.

If we don’t keep people engaged, we’re not going to move you. And if we move you, we’ve done something useful. That’s what anybody who writes genre knows.

As you always discover when you make something, typically if your object isn’t frivolous, people’s relationship to it isn’t frivolous.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

Love is, after all, a selfish thing; and it throws a black shadow on anything between which and the light it stands.

I don’t want to do anything over again, ever again. I want only to do what I haven’t done. There’s no “again.” There’s only the future. I hate the past – especially my own past.

Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it’s supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There’s nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.

No one’s promised anything. You could have the biggest record on radio and sell no records.

I never drink anything hot; I don’t like hot drinks, very strange.