“I'm serious, Jim. You need to put this crap away. You walk into school on Monday talking to me, or anyone else, about the city's pesky troll problem, and you're not exactly going to get a lot of pe...”

“He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed an intercom button on the wall. "Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?" Seve...”

“Something warned me that what I might see would haunt me forever.”

“So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. ...”

“I say making movies is like eating a sandwich of shit. Sometimes you get more bread, sometimes less bread, but you always get shit." (Guardian interview 2006)”

“Success is fucking up on your own terms.”

“Sibyl, what do you want?I want to live, the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world a...”

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that ...”

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

“Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”

“It's true, I'm impressed with myself, almost daily. If I don't impress myself then how am I ever to feel accomplished?" "Who cares if you impress others?" "Indeed. Others' opinions hardly matter, b...”

“Winston Breen was solving a puzzle, but then Winston Breen was always solving a puzzle.”

“Who hides a ring? Who sets up this whole cockamamie production with puzzle pieces and treasure hunts and who knows what else over a ring?”