I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

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

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

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