I'm frequently surprised, sometimes bugged off, and sometimes happy, depending on the actor. It's a fact of life that just as often as not an actor can breathe life into a line as he can destroy it by misinterpretation, and I've been blessed frequently by having good actors.

I'm an affluent screenwriter and all that - I'm a known screenwriter, but I'm not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.

You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and what-all. If you write beautifully, you can write beautifully.

If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.

I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.

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

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.