Hollywood's a great place to live... if you're a grapefruit.

If the producer doesn't like you, consequently he reads the script with a very negative view. But I wouldn't preoccupy myself with that, I don't give a damn. You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and whatall.

Bias and prejudice make me angry...more than anything.

The most important thing about the first sale is for the very first time in your life something written has value and proven value because somebody has given you money for the words that you've written, and that's terribly important, it's a tremendous boon to the ego, to your sense of self-reliance, to your feeling about your own talent.

There are a lot I'm proud of, and a lot I wish the hell I'd never written.

In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.

Emmies, for example, most of that's bullshit. Oscars are even worse. We have a strange, terrible affliction in this town. Everybody walks around bent-backed from slapping each other on the backs so much. It looks like arthritis but it isn't. It's hunger for recognition. And it's sort of like, well, I'll scratch you this time if you'll scratch me next time. That kind of thing.