Screenwriters From The United States

"I just happen to be someone who happens to like the fear to be created in my mind. That’s why I like the more minimalistic approach. It’s just a taste thing. I’m not as into the blood and guts."

"I’m sure everyone is different, but I believe the performance will always be stronger if you’re working with another actor."

"The creative community has a lot more ideas than the executive community feels comfortable with."

"We’ve been doing this for awhile, when you’ve been doing this a long time, you cross your fingers and hope for the best, but you never know. To find an audience that’s passionate, that’s as good as it gets."

"My biggest influence was my father, Rolf Forsberg, who was a successful independent filmmaker in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, doing mostly shorts, religious films, and eco-green-movies before they were cool. My friends and I would watch his films over and over again when they slept at my house. I got my first super 8mm camera when I was nine and I’ve been making movies ever since."

"I try not to wink at the audience too much or laugh at my own satire. Good B-movie camp has to be played deadly serious. Let the audience do the chuckling."

"When you look at three hundred people, you’ll find some that just fit. It’s like a bell rings, “They’re perfect. That’s them!” Then once that happens, eighty-percent of communicating the world to them is achieved. They are now communicating that world to me. We’re now creating it together. I’m a very collaborative director. I bring them into the world by being excited. I try to give that to them and give them a tremendous amount of leeway to let them build up their characters."

"In medicine, especially emergency medicine, you have very little time to really understand what’s going on with somebody, the story about what lead them to this is what I look at. There’s a beginning, middle and end. It’s much more revealing and will often tell you more than tests will. The tests are just there to confirm it."

"I would say, “Be yourself above all else.” Don’t try to be what Hollywood, your managers, your agents, friends, photographers or teachers want you to be. Be who you are. With that in mind, you will find that you will have a lot of hits and misses but you can always go home knowing who you are at the end of the day. That’s a rare thing in Hollywood. This town, though it appears it’s a dream factory and to some extent it is, produces a lot more bruised bananas than peaches, if you get my meaning."

"There are a lot of demons and supernatural forces happening in entertainment right now, but there aren’t a lot of regular guys who have a lot of faults who are going out and slugging it out with the demons and the monsters. You know, giving them a real slug-fest and that's what Ash does well."

"Movies are going to go away eventually. I just want to make sure that, when they do, they turn into something better."

"I'm allowed to make fun of my wife. I asked her and she said yes. [...] I said, "Do you mind if I still make fun of you on stage?" And my wife said, "Yeah, you can make fun of me. But just don't say that I'm a bitch and that you don't like me." I was like, "Whoa, the bar is so much lower than I ever imagined. That's it?" [...] Also, I would never say that, not even as a joke, that my wife is a bitch and I don't like her. That is not true. My wife is a bitch and I like her so much."

"And now there's nazis again. When I was a kid, nazis was just an anology you would use to decimate your child during an argument at the dinner table. Now there's new nazis. I don't care for these new nazis, and you may quote me on that. These new nazis, "Jews are the worst, and Jews ruin everything, and Jews try to take over your life." It's like, you know what, motherfucker? My wife is Jewish. I know all that, how do you know all that?"

"I would say it comes down to having your own life outside of Hollywood. It’s really just that simple. If you only live in the Hollywood world, you will be consumed by it. It will eat you alive. When you are finally spat out you will be someone who is wrecked emotionally, personally and financially. You have to have your own life outside this business. You have to have your own things that you dig, so that when you are told, “No,” and you will be told, “No” a million times, you will be OK and come out on your feet."

"Building a gazebo in the middle of the civil war, that'd be like doing stand-up comedy now."

"You spend most of your day telling a robot that you're not a robot. Think about that for two minutes and tell me you don't want to walk into the ocean."

"Now, I don't know if you've been following the news, but I've been keeping my ears open, and it seems like everyone everywhere is super-mad about everything all the time."

"I never think about what another actor would do with the part. I only think about what I would like to do. In other words, I start very unconventionally. The actors that I typically don’t care for are the ones who are trying to be like other actors. I just try to be like myself. I start big and I let the director bring me down from there. I start with way too much usually. That way, the director can pair it down to the size he wants. Some actors prefer to start very, very small and let the director sort of mold them but, for me, it’s the other way around."

"I don't know what my body is for other than just taking my head from room to room."

"Famous people are weird as shit. They're all weird. Your suspicions are correct."

"The world is run by robots, and we spend most of our day telling them that we're not a robot just to log on and look at our own stuff."

"That's how I walk into rooms. I'm 35 years old, I am six feet tall. I lower myself, I go, "Hi. Knock knock." I say "knock, knock" out loud."

"I'm gross. I have hair on my shoulders now. I don't even have a joke for that, that's how much I hate that shit."

"The greatest assembly of them all, once a year, Stranger Danger. [...] You are gathered together as a school and you are told never to talk to an adult that you don't know, and you are told this by an adult that you don't know."

"College was like a four-year game show called Do My Friends Hate Me or Do I Just Need to Go to Sleep? But instead of winning money, you lose $120,000."

"How dare you clap? How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made in my life? I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen and then I didn't."

"College is just your opinion. Just you raising your hand and being like, "I think Emily Dickinson's a lesbian." And they're like, "Partial credit." And that's a whole thing."

"Marijuana is legal in, like, 18 or 19 states in one form or another. It's insane. Yeah, well... All right, don't "whoo" if you're white. It's always been legal for us."

"You remember being 12, when you're like, "No one look at me or I'll kill myself.""

"I loved being a temp, because I would just go from office to office and be terrible at a different job for a week."

"Crazy people are like that. They have unlimited crazy currency. [...] The things they say mean nothing to them, but they mean everything to me."

"I know now that I'm definetely never gonna be president. Not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly."

"For me, the story always comes from character whether they're ponies or robots or aliens."

"If I had any advice to give, it's to be your own toughest critic when you write a spec or pitch -- a great idea goes a long way, but it's important to craft and polish your work so that you're communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, and that they're as entertaining as can be (remember, competition is stiff). And if you're pitching, put yourself in the mind of the producer or executive you're pitching to: figure out how to make your idea specific to the show, yet be inventive -- they'll want to hear something they might not have come up with on their own, that's why they're taking pitches in the first place."

"When you get to do a one-shot, the whole world is open to you. It’s almost harder to decide what story to tell when you have the freedom to do anything you want!"

"Usually when I need to name a character, I look around the studio and see who I could hand 15 nano-seconds of fame to."

"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"When I walk down the street, I need everyone to like me so much. It's exhausting. My wife said that walking around with me was like walking around with someone who's running for mayor of nothing."

"I didn't mean to make it sound like we don't want children. We don't, but I didn't mean to make it sound like that."

"I got offended on behalf of my imaginary kids. [...] My children are not gonna be playing out on grass. They will be up in their rooms playing violent video games and catfishing pedophiles."

"2029? That's not a real year. By 2029, I'll be drinking moon juice with President Jonathan Taylor Thomas."

"I like having a puppy that's a bulldog, 'cause it's like having a baby that is also a grandma."

"Real estate agents have to deal with the dumbest people in the world making the biggest decisions of their lives."

"It's just creepy to have an ex out there after things have ended badly. They have a lot of information. Anyone who's seen my dick and met my parents needs to die. I can't have them roaming around."

"It is so much easier not to do things than to do them that you would do anything is totally remarkable."

"I was raised Catholic. I don't know if you can tell that from the everything about me."

"In terms of like, instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin."

"I'm one of the worst drivers I have ever seen, and I just want you all to know that, if you're ever on the highway behind me, I hear you honking, and I also don't want me to be doing what I'm doing."

"A "hero" is any man who does his job. You a lot of times see headlines that are like, "hero tutor teaches after school", and you're like, yeah."