A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.