Directing offers you the hope that your vision will reach the screen, unmolested and intact. Therefore, it's tantalizing to all writers.

I think the greatest danger of the promise of space travel is that it can lead us to be cavalier about the world we live on, if we assume we can find or make more worlds. I think in our lifetimes we surely will not, probably in the lifetimes of our great-great-grand-descendants we will not.

It is true that, with TV, a writer gets a great deal more respect.

A lot of screenwriters have a drawer of unsold scripts that they cut their teeth on. I don't have one. Everything I've written, after my first spec, I wrote on assignment. Everything I've written was work.

You need a human story to intersect those points of interest with real stakes on the line, and then things start to be fun, where you can see the ramifications, you see the impact on people's lives of big changes - like taking a man of science, like a surgeon, and robbing him of his understanding of the universe and forcing him into a newer and wider understanding.

The world may hold startling developments and shocking unknowns.

For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.