All the animals come out at night..

That's just my disposition - to create a situation where you have to come up with something..

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenp….

Once you have a situation that is fresh, then you sort of believe in it and it becomes normal. So you do end up with protagonists that haven't been i….

You think it's a blessing to know what God wants? I'll tell you what he wants. He wants to push me over! Can't he see what's inside of me? All my sin….

When you have people who are embarrassing themselves for a living, who are making themselves look foolish and vulnerable and emotional for a living, ….

Contradiction is the heart and soul of character and drama. You're always looking for it. I loved her so much I hit her; that's character. I loved he….

You know, when you're in your twenties you use a great deal of symbolism. You somehow think that a character standing beneath a cross is more interes….

Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me..

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater….

Because many of the films I've made have had an intellectualedge, it's harder for me to lie. It's harder for me to go to peoplewith money and say I d….

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state..

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it open….

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself..

Don't ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you..

There's the generation that made the rules, the generation that codified them. The generation that broke them - that's mine. The generation that laug….

Anything that doesn't bore me I think is doable because it's keeping me awake..

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have intere….

Words are a completely different form of expression. The word P-E-N-I-S is an entirely different form of communication than a photograph of the same ….

Nobody has shot a strip club in black and white in a long time..