“Michael Eisner, who is my mentor said, “If you want to have a happy life, be a mentor and have a mentor.” And I would always find kids younger than me or older than me and try to help them along. It’s a virtuous circle, which is an old Greek...
“What I say to almost everyone is the same thing: you have to take your time. You can’t rush. You know, I got a lot of advice from my dad, and he would tell me this one thing. He’d say, “It takes about three to five years to write a good book....
“For those of you who are sitting there… waiting for that opportunity to come to you, you’ve got to let your intention be known. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and ask for what you want. Get out there. You’d be surprised. And...
“Putting yourself on the page is what’s going to make your writing special. You know, there’s billions of screenplays and now with the self-publishing world, so many novels out there. So how do you individuate your book, your screenplay? Where it...
“I was working out the schedule for Into the Woods, and I sat Meryl [Streep] down. I said, ‘Meryl, I’m thinking that I’ll bring in the cast, we’ll work for about three weeks, and then we’ll have you come in, and then we’ll...
“When I’m on airplanes and every now and then I’ll see people reading one of my books, whenever they stop, they stop and they put it in the seat back in front of them. They close their eyes. I want to walk up to him and shake him and say, why did you...
