You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.

I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.

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'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.

Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.

Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.

As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.