If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

All right, I am often brash, rude and brutally direct. Someday I'm going to die and I don't have time to toe-dance around the periphery of hatred.

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn't afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.