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

With a terrible script you hustle and try to make it better. But with a good script it can be trouble because you rest on your laurels, so to speak, you think it's going to translate easily.

Writing is a hard gig, and it's hard to convey a lot. That's why scripts tend to be a little bit overwritten.

With some writers, the script looks beautiful on the page, but nobody actually speaks like that.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

A good script is like a work of art in itself. I've read hundreds of scripts, and good ones are very rare. If the writer has something to say, and a voice, and a plot that matches character, and an emotional trajectory that works, then I'd be an idiot to fool around with it. It's just that few scripts ever are like that.

I liked to think I had written 'scripts' when I was in high school, but looking back at them, they were about thirty pages of wannabe-Mamet dialogue with a staple through them.

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.