Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.

I think the only real referent for anybody writing drama is probably Hamlet. You have the most extreme tragic drama, this sort of blood-boltered thing, but it's also very funny, which is simply a matter of the playwright being alive and observant and entertaining, and understanding not only the world but what will play.

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 usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers.

If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.