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.

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.

I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.

A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.

I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.