Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.

There are no crowds out there demanding to see smoking scenes in movies.

I have only one loyalty – to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer.

Politics has become entertainment.

The terrible, diabolic thing with this disease is that you are always looking behind your shoulder every couple months with the most recent checkup to see whether there is any sign of it, and I thank God to say at this point there is not.

Fact is we went on to do other things. But we still wanted to do our success like rock’n’roll stars.

I have my own religious bond with the God in my own head.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What’s lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives – they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

I just wanted to make sure that what I write is what appears on screen, to not have some idiot change it on its way to the screen.

Now on a personal level with things like the California Tax Commission… I really think if people started banding together and saying no to this it could snowball and that could really help.

My father could have been deported because on his immigration application he said that he was a printer, obviously because he didn’t want them to be checking his writings.

Cigarettes are not a part of human behaviour, they are a habit.

I have always been fascinated by the corruption of power.

I always wanted to be a rock’n’roll star.

Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock’n’roll, politics as a movie.

From what I’ve been able to determine, many of our big stars are addicted to tobacco. They want to smoke in movies for the same reason I smoked as I wrote, which is that they think their performance is going to be better.

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

That’s sort of what I felt… I miss drinking, I thought bars were truly holy places.

I was a militant smoker, and in my case, I think I particularly used smoking because what I felt was a kind of politically correct big brother assault on smoking.

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.