“As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.”

“The answer to the question, 'where's the drama?' is another question: 'what's the problem?”

“As a writer, you can’t get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn’t want to know.”

“Fear is elemental to every human endeavour involving risk and change, which includes ALL creative endeavours. To be creative is to be anxious. To endure the anxiousness - to face it and work with it, to allow it to lay bare what has been hidden - is the beginning of faith, which, in a certain sense, is the courage to become, to become present, along with all the other characters, tribes and audiences whose actions move the unfolding drama that is the world.”

“Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.”

“Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.”

“The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.”

“As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.”

“We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.”

“Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The ‘meant’ is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that’s the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don’t. It’s stories all the way down. And all the way up.”

“No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It is not cheap, and it’s hard to come by, owing partly to the fact that it is the heir of disappointment, frustration, betrayal and deceit. However, it is not the inheritance that matters so much as what you do with it. In the face of seemingly insurmountable problems what do you do, and why do you do it? The same holds for dramatic characters whose strength, courage, insight and wisdom have to be earned.”