Quote

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

They know you're not Alfred Hitchcock, but you need to be enough Alfred Hitchcock for them not to be bothered by it. That's a reassuring thing.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

Now, honestly, every movie set that I go on, I walk onto set with the confidence that there is nothing that they can throw at me that's gonna surprise me.

On TV, you never know where it's going. They may even lie to you about where it's going. You never really know because the scripts come in every couple of weeks or so.

I just have a way about me where people know that they don't tell me what to do, they kind of just wait for me to do it.

People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say.'

Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.

When you aren't doing too many films, people find other things to write about you.