I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.

What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?

If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.

A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

At some point you’ll have to get serious about life.