We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

I would never ever condone any violence of any kind. But in the theater of fiction, blood is delightful.

I have a feeling the writers who find screenwriting difficult are usually just not lazy enough for the job. They don't know how to stop before the task is done. I've always had a knack for leaving things unfinished, which makes screenwriting easier for me than most.

I've often said, not totally jokingly, that screenwriting doesn't really qualify as real writing at all. You don't string sentences into paragraphs. You don't maintain a constant breath, or create internal rhythms, or even develop a fully-formed thought. The camera does all that work for you!

I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.

The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

I found once you start writing about God it's really fun. It's like a rock singer saying baby. Baby, baby, baaayy-by. You start saying God on the page and you don't want to stop.