“I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.”

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.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

You don’t have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie.

I steal from every movie ever made.

My parents said, Oh, he’s going to be a director someday. I wanted to be an actor.

If I’m doing my job right, then I’m not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I’m just jotting it down.

If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.

I don’t believe in putting in music as a band aid to get you over some rough parts or bad film making. If it’s there it’s got to add to it or take it to another level.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can’t ever remember a time when I didn’t.

It’s nice to get invited to the parties and to be able to hobnob and celebrate a job well done with your colleagues.

In real life there are no bad guys. Everybody just has their own perspective.

My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I’ll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

When we love all parts of ourselves, when we bless all of ourselves, when we honor all of our history and all of our insecurities, doubts, worries, and fears, we become the women that we always wanted to be.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

I think we learn more from those times in our history where we stumbled as a democracy than we learn from the glorious chapters.

With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.

I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I’m tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.

History’s long arc is different than the today’s headlines.

There has never been a better time in the history of time than right now to start a business.