The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.

America is a very divided country now. Not only are there red states and blue states, there are now red facts and blue facts. The right-wing believe in creationism. The left in evolution.

I've always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they're looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, "Oh, we've already done something just like that."

I probably wouldn't have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.

The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.