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I made three or four different fonts during 'Short Term 12' -' it was how I'd calm my mind between scenes. I have graph paper and gel pens, and I would do the alphabet: just do 'a' over and over again until I got it perfect and then go to 'b' and then 'c'.

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I adapted an O. Henry short story called 'By Courier,' which got nominated for a Best Short Subject Oscar.

I love writing in compressed time periods because the act of survival in the midst of panic and fear, that's where true heroism comes. If you have a uniform, and you're expected to do things, it's a sort of incremental heroism.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.