You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.
You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.
If I have to produce movies, direct movies, whatever to change the way Hollywood treats older women, I'll do it. If I have to bend the rules, I will. If I have to break them, I will.
I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.
If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked.
I will not attempt to deny the reasonableness and necessity of a party war; but in carrying on that war all principles and rules of justice should not be departed from.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?
I always say that it's about breaking the rules. But the secret of breaking rules in a way that works is understanding what the rules are in the first place.
As far as critics, I'm not a hip guy. I was never on drugs. Nobody ever felt sorry for me 'cause I went straight or found God. I always had God. I've always like, played by the rules.
