I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I — Dreams on Spec

"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it—the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

"I think that it’s easy to give it away—give the definition of success away. Empower other people in determining whether you have talent. The catch-22 is that the more you do that the less you’ll be able to write. That’s the hard part – writing is all about the preservation of your own voice. So if you give that voice away by guessing what you think and you think and you think as you go, you’ll have less to say and then it’ll go away completely!"

"Oh, I remember on Dave, I’d written a bad draft. I was on page 150 and climbing and I had no money then. ... I went home and I said to my wife that I needed to write it again because I wasn’t satisfied. So we took out a loan—a second mortgage on the house—to finish the script and Mike Ovitz, who was a very powerful agent in Hollywood at the time was yelling at me to deliver the script to one of his very powerful clients ‘cause I was late. There was a huge amount of pressure. I literally threw away the first draft and started again from page one."

"Paul Guay (The Little Rascals, Liar Liar, Heartbreakers): For the first time, I heard actors saying my lines and my partner’s lines, and it was – it was extremely thrilling because the kids—most of them—were too young to change them, so they were actually reading them as written, which was nice, and it hasn’t happened a lot since then. Although I have to mention that one of the kids, who was ten, came up to us when we were doing rewrites and said, You know, can you write some more stuff for me? And I thought, This is good training for the Jim Carreys of the world."

"Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard): Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers Schmucks with Underwoods, but 20 years earlier Irving Thalberg … said, The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it."

"Ed Solomon (Men in Black): The first screenplay I ever sold was something I’d written with Chris Matheson, my sometimes writing partner. It was Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure. And we had a meeting with the director – not Steve Herek who ended up directing the movie, but a director prior to that, who had some really lame ideas. And Chris and I said, I don’t think that would really work. And this director said, Well, if you don’t think that’s a good idea, we’ll – we’ll find some writers who do think it’s a good idea. That was, you know, meeting one. And we thought, Agh."

"Its queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset."

"Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine."

"While our primary goal is to maintain the most powerful military force in the world at the lowest possible cost, we will never be unmindful of those communities and individuals who are temporarily affected by changes in the pattern of Defense spending. Men and women, who have devoted their lives and their resources to the needs of their country, are entitled to help and consideration in making the transition to other pursuits. We will continue to help local communities by mobilizing and coordinating all the resources of the Federal Governments to overcome temporary difficulties created by the curtailment of any Defense activity. We will phase out unnecessary Defense operations in such a way as to lessen the impact on any community, and we will work with local communities to develop energetic programs of self-help, calling on the resources of state and local governments--and of private industry--as well as those of the Federal Government. There is ample evidence that such measures can succeed. Former military bases are now in use throughout the country in communities which have not only adjusted to necessary change, but have created greater prosperity for themselves as a result. Their accomplishments are a tribute to the ingenuity of thousands of our citizens, and a testimony to the strength and resiliency of our economy and our system of government."

"Are people naturally destructive, immoral, predatory and self-seeking, only to be kept in order by harsh laws and fiercely deterrent mandatory sentences? Or are men and women naturally orderly, merciful, humane and bred with a need for justice and mutual aid? Of course these qualities, or defects, are not evenly distributed, and undoubtedly there is much of each in all of us, but when it comes to the law some sort of distinction can be drawn. Are you a Shylock or a Bassanio? Shylock pinned his faith on the words in the contract, the nature of his bond and the duty of the state to uphold the letter of the law regardless of human suffering. Bassanio put another point of view. More important than the sanctity of the law was the plight of the individual parties in the particular case."

"I cant play games. I have friends, older women, who tell me Im foolish to let Roman know how deeply I care about him. They tell me all sorts of things like "keep a man guessing", "men become bored with too much devotion". They tell me I am being foolish. Well, foolish I am."

"Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men."