Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.