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Writers are always sort of threatening to direct, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.

Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.

My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'

When the scenes are written really great, we as actors try not to mess them up by getting in the way.

You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.

Most of the time, actors respond to the thing that's so far from who they are. We all want to play the serial killer and the ex-con.

I'm one of the writers that would die if I didn't say what I needed to say. For me, it's a matter of survival to write.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

Sometimes the writing can be so good that the actor doesn't really have to do anything.