I don't mean to talk so much about screenplay writing. Who wants to talk about screenplay writing? I've taught it and I felt like a charlatan because what I was teaching I probably couldn't do.

I went to LA because my parents were there and somebody asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. It was easy, it wasn't easy to do, but I fell into it. I made a living as an actor for a long time, but I didn't think of myself as an actor, I thought I was a writer.

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.

Hollywood's always saying, Yesterday! and scares you to death with all that deadline and yelling and impatience stuff.

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.

I wonder if these editors, why they're not writers sometimes, because they know so much about writing.