Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.

A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.

If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.

I started out as a writer with an hour removed from Kingdom of Heaven. You have to make one print for the entire world, and that's something that influences the theatrical cuts of pictures to an enormous degree. It's a reality. You can't have one cut for the Sunni, and one for the Shia, and one each for Tories, Whigs, vegetarians, one cut for the Cineplex, and one for literary intellectuals.

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.

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.

That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control