With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history.

We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing.

There are moments in one's life where you look back and you say, 'Well, I wish I had done this differently.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

First of all, I should preface this by the observation that artists are not the best judges of what they've done and the word definitive does not belong, in my opinion, in any conversation about art. When somebody says it's the "definitive" something, I'm always recoiling.

Movie studios, Hollywood studios, by and large are not making the kind of movies that I go to see.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.