The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.

I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.

Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.

I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money.

It's only words... unless they're true.

In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.

Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.

Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.

The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle.

I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.

Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.

When I started out I was a failed actor.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.

What I value most in my friends is loyalty.

It's upsetting to be a man in our society.

American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.

Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good.

In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.

They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.

I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.

The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.

I love the British.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.

I won't ever do e-mail.

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

I used to think I'd like to be a fireman - in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.

A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.

I don't really have a social life.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.

People only speak to get something.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.