On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.

I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.

I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.

All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, "It's very visual, isn't it," and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.