I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

Naturally, people's image is of a performer, but the reality of it is the writing for me has always been the most important thing and the most rewarding thing.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter regional distribution codes in data field 97 to facilitate regression analysis on the back end.

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.

It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that.