The naive thing I suppose is simply that we thought, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the end of history and we were entering a brave new world minus the Soviet Union where everything was going to be peaches and cream.

I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."

A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

What’s the difference between and actor and a movie star. An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

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

Once you decide that you're going to have the death of Spock, then how does that affect the other people? Why is it there? I got a lot of stick from a lot of people from the very beginning about the idea of killing Spock. Somebody said, "You can't kill him." And I said, "Sure you can; the only question is whether you do it well."