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" The dull externals of the screenwriter's working life are well known: We are the people taking up too much table space at cafes. "

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" With all my films, the pace is not very fast, and so people get bored with them and comment that they're just people talking in rooms and all that. "

" The cinema I particularly love is the cinema of the golden age of the studios in the 1930s. One of the really nice things about it was the way teams of actors and directors and crew people worked together again and again. "

" I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes. "

" Paris is the destination for brokenhearted American women. I think men go there and have their hearts broken, but women come there with their hearts broken. "

" The usual key to getting films made seems to be a producer's terrier-like determination not to let it go. Unfortunately, such producers often seem prone to sinking their claws into mediocre projects. "

" My family was entirely political, all the time, on the left. The opposite of that is not to be political on the right. It's trying not to be - politics is not everything. There's life other than politics. Politics intrudes. "

" I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep. "

" I learned that you have to say that you're a filmmaker. You're not a screenwriter; you're not a director for hire. You've got to take charge. You're a filmmaker, and you're going to make a film. "

" You can be an American or an Englishman or Canadian and be a Parisian. It's a very admirable culture, and people want to identify with it. "

" Paris is a Roach Motel for top American journalists: They check in, having won the plum foreign posting, but never leave. "

" I was in Paris for nine years, starting in '98. One of the great things when I was first there were these wonderful CD collections, selling for almost nothing. For ten euros, you'd get three CDs of all the Gershwin songs. "

" I remember going to one party of this preppy, bourgeois crowd, and there was some obnoxious character there, really bad news, and saying, 'Oh my God, so the caricature you always see in films actually exists.' "

" So much of artistic creation is just exclusion. It's not creating things; it's just excluding things that really aren't going to be helpful. "

" Oddly, in a sense, I still have more confidence as a director than my ability as a writer. Somehow, directing is just really easy. It's just about being really honest about how you feel about what you're seeing. "

" I don't like the word 'perfectionist,' because it's self-flattering. It's tooting your own horn and implies that you actually can achieve perfection. I prefer 'particularist.' "

" I think one of the saving illusions of the film business is everything seems like it's about to happen. It's always about to happen. It's only looking back that you see the wasteland. "

" I like things that are sort of comic and humorous rather than satirical. "

" If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another. "

" Sometimes, people who are very fastidious about what they're going to do in their work are not very fastidious in their private life. I'm like that. I love it when people do really nice things around me, but I don't have time to do it for myself. It's very hard for me to even buy a new pair of trousers. "

" The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in. "

" I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of. "

" You have to constantly work on your script if it needs it. You don't accept, 'Oh, I did a draft and...' No, it's your responsibility to work on the script as much as possible and make it better and better. "

" The 'Damsels' crew was low-budget, young people who were doing their first thing almost. A lot of it. It felt like Pied Piper or Rumpelstiltskin or whatever: it was me and people thirty years younger or more. But it was great; it was really fun. "

" One of the reasons it's important to make a new project is it always seems to improve the reputations of the previous one. Whatever you did before is better than what you've just done, apparently. But I've had to follow the first rule of journalism: Never read the comments. "

" My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around. "

" I think when my parents were together, my family was too prosperous for our psychological health. Not that they were that rich, but I feel that usually inherited wealth causes psychological problems. "

" I can fake decent penmanship, but generally, it's really just terrible. And, unfortunately for me, maybe fortunately for the reader, it's very often illegible. If I get an idea, and if I do remember to write it down, which is rare, I write in such a way that I can't read a letter. "

" I really like working with people again and again, and I don't know why everyone doesn't do it. Because you already know them, and you know how good they are. "

" In Mexico, wealth and poverty live next to each other and are cordial with each other - in my experience. "

" So much of selling a film in the industry is about creating a fulcrum where all the pressure comes to bear, and something seems suddenly valuable and approved by an audience. It's amazing how people could pick up tons of films on the cheap, but they don't because they wait until everything is laid out for them. "