I'm not suggesting at all that we take away all of the characters' vices. I am suggesting that this particular vice is so insidious, so nefarious, and so deadly that simply by glamorizing it or poisoning our young adults, and I think it's a very separate category, but in no way am I suggesting that we move on from banning smoking in movies to banning drinking, you know, or whatever else we want to do.

You must show how gruesome that death is because if you don't, then you turn into some kind of comic book and pain, then death, doesn't have a consequence, and pain doesn't have a consequence.

Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk.

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .

I do want to make a special appeal to women movie stars to, I think, have a special responsibility these days to stop smoking, not to do it up on screen because the example that's being set is really an awful example.