You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.

I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.

Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

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

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

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.

As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.