I tell people that we must have the courage to share what we feel, but no one follows me.
Practice until it becomes boring, then practice until it becomes beautiful.
Look. . . it's empty. . . as empty as a politician's promise!
Nothing I do can't be done by a ten-year-old. . . with fifteen years of practice.
Remember, your not your props, create the magic.
If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.
I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.
And will you succeed? Yes indeed, yes indeed! Ninety-eight and three-quarters percent guaranteed!
I had no intention of replacing Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. There were a few things that made me want to do the movie. They were the script which had a different direction to it, and it was a chance to do a very different Quaid. I didn't read the short story until I went to college. Reading the story had a different effect on me of how I pictured him to be and the tone of the story was different. In the story, he's a bit more of an everyman.