Out of complexity, find simplicity!
You can't fix a bad script after you start shooting. The problems on the page only get bigger as they move to the big screen.
I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move!
John Wayne represents more force, more power, than anybody else on the screen.
When you've got some talent, your job is to use it.
I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.
Fortune favors the prepared.
I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.
The trust that I once built has been betrayed. But I'd rather live tellin' the truth and be judged for my mistakes, than falsely held up, given props, loved and praised.
My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.