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.

I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.

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.

In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.

The era I love most is the Federal period, just after the Revolution and the formation of the United States. The birth of America as a nation coincided with the Romantic era and I've always been thoroughly into the Romantics and I've always been thoroughly into America, particularly at the time when it was a brand new idea, when it was something brand new in the world. It was a very exciting time in the world because of the birth of America

Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.