In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.