I remember being taught in school that you would underline things that you liked. I remember just underlining everything as a kid, thinking, 'This has all gotta be important!' I would just underline the whole thing!

I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember, all I wanted to do was make movies.

No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.

There’s a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world.

It's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It always seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) - that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind.

So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.