I think I’d rather win, for example, a Writer’s Guild award than almost anything on earth. And the few nominations I’ve had with the guild, and the few awards I’ve had, represented to me a far more legitimate concrete achievement than anything.
Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.
If you need drugs to be a good writer, you are not a good writer.
I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.
I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot – we inhale from our Bartlett’s.
If the producer doesn’t like you, consequently he reads the script with a very negative view. But I wouldn’t preoccupy myself with that, I don’t give a damn. You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and whatall.
If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.
Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the Twilight Zone.
If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that’s all.
Somewhere between apathy and anarchy lies the thinking human being.
Somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. If you’re a really good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you’ll write, and you’ll be read.
Writers, like most human beings, are adaptable creatures. They can learn to accept subordination without growing fond of it. No writer can forever stand in the wings and watch other people take the curtain calls while his own contributions get lost in the shuffle.
The writer’s no different. When he’s rejected, that paper is rejected, in a sense, a sizeable fragment of the writer is rejected as well. It’s a piece of himself that’s being turned down.
I’m an affluent screenwriter and all that – I’m a known screenwriter, but I’m not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.
Over the long haul I’d say that most directors I’ve worked with have been pretty sensitive to the quality of the interpreted scenes.
Personally, my daughter’s wedding gave me a tremendous pleasure. And the wedding was a radiant event and I enjoyed it. I was afraid I’d cry. I’m given to crying at odd times, and I was very much afraid of the emotionalism of that moment, but I didn’t even come close to crying.
I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease.
Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that’s unique.
I’m a Western-cultured man who subscribes to the ancient saw that men do not cry, I don’t cry either. I’ll go to a movie, for example, and not infrequently something triggers the urge to weep, but I don’t allow myself.
I don’t believe in reincarnation. That’s a cop-out, I know. I don’t really want to be reincarnated.