I'm not an ascetic.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.

In Chicago, we love our crooks!

The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.

I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.

There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.

People only speak to get something.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't really have a social life.

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

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.

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.'