“If I’ve made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I’ve accomplished something.”

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

I’m very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I’ve never really considered myself a writer.

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.

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

That’s how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It’s when a scene works emotionally and it’s cool and clever, then it’s great. That’s what you want.

Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve seen very few people in the world accomplish anything unless they were optimists.

We are called to be fruitful – not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

In business, you take a swing and you hope that you hit a home run, but sometimes you strike out. Strikeouts and failures are important. Being down, getting punched in the gut every once in a while by life and coming back up, that’s accomplishment.

The size of your accomplishments, the quality of your achievement, will depend very largely on how big a man you see in yourself, what sort of image you get of your possible self, yourself at your best.

People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about.

Somehow forgiveness, with love and tolerance, accomplishes miracles that can happen in no other way.

If you doubt you can accomplish something, then you can’t accomplish it. You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.