I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.

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

You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.

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.

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

Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.