"There's a careless optimism in the [Hollywood] executives' minds when they spend this money.  It's pin money to them, these options or development deals they make to get the script, they feel they can throw it away.  If it gets done somewhere else then they'll get some of their money back."

"We were talking about Jack Nicholson, and that level of aspiration for the film [based on my novel].  What happened was a change in the hierarchy at Warner Brothers, and the people who had brought the project in no longer had power.  That was the first time that happened.  But it happened over and over.  You don't know what to believe, and you never know for sure why you're getting turned down, or even why they were interested in you in the first place."

"You go in with these extremely high hopes.  I don't know why after a while you have those hopes, because it's very hard to continue to be serious about writing screenplays.  You get cynical, and you feel like the money's the only thing."

"It's still very possible to make money writing pure spectacle—there will always be a brisk market for porn and explosions."

"The usual negative attitude toward anything that you present to folks in Hollywood: They say 'no' all the time; very rarely do they say 'yes.'  They're in the business of saying 'no;' they're in the business of not making movies."

"By the time I started getting hit with 'Show, don't tell' as a screenwriter, I had already had enough experience under my belt to know that, as an overriding cinematic aesthetic, it was more or less bullshit."

"I had a 260-page screenplay [for Something Wicked This Way Comes].  That's six hours.  [Director] Jack [Clayton] said, 'Well, now you've got to cut out forty pages.'  I said, 'God, I can't.'  He said, 'Go ahead, I know you can do it.  I'll be behind you.'  So I cut forty pages out.  He said, 'Okay, now you've got to cut another forty pages out.'  I got it down to 180 pages, and then Jack said, 'Thirty more.'  I said, 'Impossible, impossible!'  Okay, I got it down to 150 pages.  And Jack said, 'Thirty more.'  Well, he kept telling me I could do it, and, by God, I went through a final time and got it down to 120 pages.  It was better."

"Mamet and Macy's method to deconstruct the fundamental unit of a novelist, a playwright or a screenwriter's Storytelling is a Godsend. Read A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the meat of what came out of Mamet and Macy’s lectures and the foundation of The Atlantic Theater Company in New York. It's so simple, direct and easy to understand, it's mind blowing."

"If you are a screenwriter, LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL translates to INDEPENDENT AND STUDIO. If you are a playwright, LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL translates to CHARACTER DRIVEN AND PLOT DRIVEN. If you are a nonfiction writer LITERARY AND COMMERCIAL translates to JOURNALISM AND NARRATIVE NONFICTION. No matter your intended Story career path, the divide remains… and always will."

"Films are relatively short, and are comparable to long short stories or short novellas."

"Unlike with screenplays, novels are meant to be read, not produced, and the finished book is a final product, ready to be consumed by an audience."

"The movie or TV show is the finished product; a screenplay is not.  Scripts are only one step in a complex chain of events leading to the final show or film."

"Screenwriters and novelists see the world in very different ways, and have very different observing devices for interpreting their fictional worlds.  Shifting from a screenwriting sensibility to a prose sensibility is the hardest hurdle you will face and also the most difficult one to wrap your head around."

"Never use screenwriters as your [novel] beta readers.  You need feedback from people who are voracious book readers, not film/TV fans."