I'd rather go along with this sense of illusion that I'm a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that's preordained.

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.

In terms of screenwriting adaptations it's trying to cut out stuff that's extraneous, without doing damage to the original piece, because you owe a debt of some respect to the original author. That's why it was bought.

(on being born on Christmas Day, 1924) I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.

I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.

How can you put on a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.