Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".

Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.

You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

If you can learn to be incredibly passionate about your work without fighting for it just because it's yours, that's a huge thing.

For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.

I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff.