The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.

It's certainly easy for me to make a fictional character mad about something. I can get them angry about something that I'm relatively indifferent about, just because I'm not educated on it, if I go to someone who is educated about it and is passionate about it. I find a point of fiction and then give it to them.

A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it.

I think that if I couldn't write, I would be unemployable.

It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.