I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.

My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.

I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.

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 think that scripts should be published, but they are published, really, because when you're a screenwriter, your stuff ends up in samizdat form on thousands and thousands of desks and shelves across the industry.

Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.

In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.