Follow your dreams, because your dreams won't follow you.
It's really hard to write a screenplay, it's nauseating. All those great writers that tried to write screenplays, they couldn't do it, most of them - John Faulkner, whoever, Aldous Huxley.
Hollywood's always saying, "Yesterday!" and scares you to death with all that deadline and yelling and impatience stuff.
I wonder if these editors, why they're not writers sometimes, because they know so much about writing.
I guess the freedom - poetic freedom - because the poetic part of short story form is an attempt to say something that's unsayable about one's incarcerated existence, and it's fun to come up with words to represent that condition, and it's fun to pull the tail of absurdity and rile it up, where you giggle at what you do or you get enthralled and in the short story.
Life is sinister. I don't know if I am representing life exactly, but sinister, I think it has to do with dreams. You're dreaming when you're awake: you're sitting on the subway and you look around, and you can think of sinister things that are kind of delightful to think of because they're not really happening, but they are in your mind. They're about wishes, desires - sexy, dangerous, hopeful, the way it could be, maybe.
Preston Sturges, who wrote The Palm Beach Story, said screenplay writing is architecture. That's why it's so rare to read one that's any good.
I'm just a regular person who believes life is simple, and I like a simple life.
My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.
Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany. '
I liked sharpening pencils and I was like, "Oh, I wonder if I could get paid to do it. " And I figured it out and I did it.