“I don’t believe in elitism. I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”

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.

As a viewer, the minute I start getting confused, I check out of the movie. Emotionally, I’m severed.

Movies are not about the weekend that they’re released, and in the grand scheme of things, that’s probably the most unimportant time of a film’s life.

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn’t mean I’m anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.

I want to have the fun of doing anime and I love anime, but I can’t do storyboards because I can’t really draw and that’s what they live and die on.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’

I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards – in the life of an artist.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Violence in real life is terrible; violence in movies can be cool. It’s just another colour to work with.

Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I’m lucky enough to be in the position where I don’t make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

Don’t write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what’s in your heart.

I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

I’m definitely guilty of thinking something is funny but thinking the audience won’t. Then three years later I will finally try it and it’ll kill them. I got to give them more credit.

I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will.

My son says I never tell stories about anyone who’s living.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.

Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.