But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.

That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.

If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.

And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.

Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.