When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

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.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.