I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.

My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.

If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.

There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.

You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can’t do one of those three things, you ain’t going to get any money.