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

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.”

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.

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.

People were like, ‘he’s collaborating with Taylor Swift’ and I was like, ‘I am?’ I think she’s wonderful. Her songwriting has inspired me for years.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Going with the flow is responding to cues from the universe. When you go with the flow, you’re surfing Life force. It’s about wakeful trust and total collaboration with what’s showing up for you.

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

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration.

Acting is collaborative because you are working with another actor, and it’s almost like a two-man juggling team. You have to really be in sync.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.