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 probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.

I had a guy at the Groucho bar clawing at my arm nearly in tears saying that until he saw The Departed he thought Americans were the ones on TV. I didn't know you had accents. I didn't know you had a class system. I didn't know you were like us. To which the answer is, probably only where I grew up, but while we're at it don't watch television and think it's the United States of America.

I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.

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

I love audiences, but they're not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.

I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition.