I don't mean to talk so much about screenplay writing. Who wants to talk about screenplay writing? I've taught it and I felt like a charlatan because what I was teaching I probably couldn't do.

I went to LA because my parents were there and somebody asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. It was easy, it wasn't easy to do, but I fell into it. I made a living as an actor for a long time, but I didn't think of myself as an actor, I thought I was a writer.

I don't mean to talk so much about screenplay writing. Who wants to talk about screenplay writing? I've taught it and I felt like a charlatan because what I was teaching I probably couldn't do.

I tried to write things, but they were so ridiculous and stupid and impossible and I had not a clue what they were, so that delusion went on for a long time. Maybe it's still going on, only somehow I sucked some people in. It was a long time of writing things that didn't make sense in the real world, and I'm embarrassed about them now in a jocular way.

I guess the freedom - poetic freedom - because the poetic part of short story form is an attempt to say something that's unsayable about one's incarcerated existence, and it's fun to come up with words to represent that condition, and it's fun to pull the tail of absurdity and rile it up, where you giggle at what you do or you get enthralled and in the short story.

Preston Sturges, who wrote The Palm Beach Story, said screenplay writing is architecture. That's why it's so rare to read one that's any good.

Hollywood's always saying, "Yesterday!" and scares you to death with all that deadline and yelling and impatience stuff.