Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.

Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good.

The job of the artist, is to say, wait a second, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's re-examine it.

Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.

The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.