I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

I started thinking about my relationship with my students; I'm this guy who comes in from book - and movie - land and descends on angel wings into their classroom.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

I write because I can't imagine not writing.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire occurs in a variety of industrial environments, not uniquely in coal environments.

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

I do small cameos here and there but nothing that requires more than a paragraph of talking, because I'm just an amateur. The movie is a whole different reality.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.

I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.

I think the definition of an artist is not necessarily tied into excellence or talent; an artist is somebody who, if you took away their freedom to make art, would lose their mind.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.

If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged.

I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

Never laugh at your girlfriends choices. You are one of them.

When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work. That's the mistake; it's not rejecting it, it's saying, 'I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.'

There cannot be any concessions on the matter of human rights or the criteria for visa liberalisation.

The Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, which might be the most corrupt piece of legislation in history, was a huge giveaway of taxpayer funds to the big pharmaceutical companies.

Think big and don’t listen to people who tell you it can’t be done. Life’s too short to think small.

'Hugo' is made in the classical style of the 1940s.

Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.

The mother-in-law came round last week. It was absolutely pouring down. So I opened the door and I saw her there and I said, 'Mother, don't just stand there in the rain. Go home.'

The increased consumption of alcoholic beverages in Canada since the outbreak of war is one evidence of this.

I started making music that I loved and was passionate and excited about, but it was really cool when I started touring to realize it's an extremely diverse group of people who come out. In the front row, I'll have everyone from a little girl in a frilly tutu, to rockers and gamers and older couples. I love it that it's just everybody.

Ooooh, I love Nashville! It seems like everywhere you walk, there's great music coming out of every wall.

Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children.

Rawn did her own thing in her own way. She cast the female gaze on a genre heavy with all-male quest fellowships, trophy females, and the occasional Smurfette. Her world was male-dominated and highly patriarchal, but she populated it with notable numbers of well-drawn female characters.

My dad was a plumber, and my mom was on and off again, either a stay-at-home mom or working with the disabled as a visiting-nurse assistant.

'Psycho' is probably the best known example of a horror film whose exclusive sound was strings, and since then, it's been hard to avoid that. The minute you have strings as your primary voice, the comparisons are always made.

Nothing like a great comedy. I love to laugh!

If some things don't make you lose your sense of reason, then you have none to lose.

I'd say without a doubt I've had the most sex scenes in any television show, ever. Last season I did eight sex scenes in one day - I haven't topped that yet.

Madonna is that forbidden thing, the Nietzschean creative woman. Her preoccupation with a high level of work doesn't allow her to follow the usual script that powerful women are expected to follow - 'don't hate me for my success, don't hate me for my power.'

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.

The reason I got into acting was not to explore myself. I was a reader, I didn't care about acting. I got into it in college, but I had no interest really in that, in getting up in front of anybody.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

The reality is that companies are full of things that are left unspoken. And even when they are out in the open, the CEO is almost always the last to know.