You are an adult when, faced with important decisions, you choose to have more faith in yourself than anything else.

In Hollywood, story content of movies follows a hierarchy of power, not the relative quality of various ideas. Hollywood does not lack for quality writing. It's just that quality writing commonly has to be sacrificed in order to propel a film into production. A studio needs a star and a director to make a film, so those are the folk who'll define the content. If they don't have the same creative sensibilities, then the content will change.

Talent is truth on display.

I'm tempted to say, 'Writing treatments is like designing a film by hiring six million monkeys to tear out pages of an encyclopedia, then you put the pages through a paper-shredder, randomly grab whatever intact lines are left, sing them in Italian to a Spanish deaf-mute, and then make story decisions with the guy via conference call.' But no... compared to writing treatments, that makes sense, too.

Most will choose to leave someone who can't bear to see them go.

Success is less rare than the courage to attempt it.

You should quit trying only after two conditions have been met: 1.) You've given yourself a legitimate shot. 2.) Trying is no longer fun.