I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing.

As the flow of subliterary "news items" and anecdotes increases, the writer's work withers and stales until, in grim transference, his life becomes his oeuvre and he his only character.

I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.

I've got to be out doing a million things. That's how I find stories. That's how I get the relationships and get the projects that I get with the writers, the directors.

Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me... anecdotes. But never a joke.