It's okay to lie as long as you reach a higher truth doing it..

I think test screenings with an audience are useful because they have no dog in the fight, they just say how they feel..

Because I've been at it so long and very steadily, I have a lot of credits, but I probably have twice as many scripts that were never made for whatev….

For me in a film, almost every scene you end up cutting a bit of the start of it out, and some of the end of it out because there's always...once you….

I think there's something strange about writing a script I've written many, many scripts - dozens and dozens of scripts - and every time I start one,….

I think Cool Hand Luke was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy re….

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's mad….

If you write an original, its like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, its like the oil wells on fire, and they bring you….

As much as I love period movies and especially more swashbuckling movies, I think that sometimes they tend to be, umm... it's hard for the audience t….

In exchange for ten years of being on top, I'm gonna end up in prison or I'm gonna end up dead, and there's something fascinating about that..

I write R-rated action dramas, and every year that goes by, that gets to be a smaller and smaller world you have to work in. You have to think of how….

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyo….

If Im in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking fo….

I know a lot of directors have a whole staff of people trying to find their next film for them. I always just end up writing mine..

Its as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy..

Its such an egotistical thing to be able to just stand there and say, Action! Its like being a little mini-god..

I worked as hard to write the worst film of the year as I did to write the best film of the year..