Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.

Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.

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

In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.

Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).