Paul Schrader

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.