“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.”

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.

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.

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.

A mob is a group of persons with heads but no brains.

I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.

Worry clogs the brain and paralyzes the thought. A troubled brain can not think clearly, vigorously, locally.

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.

If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody’s having conversations anymore. They’re sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it.

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

Some people think that I haven’t got the brains to be that clever.