"Never compromise excellence. To write for someone else is the biggest mistake that any writer makes. You should be your biggest competitor, your biggest critic, your biggest fan, because you don't know what anybody else thinks. How arrogant it is to assume that you know the market, that you know what's popular today—only Steven Spielberg knows what's popular today. Only Steven Spielberg will ever know what's popular. So leave it to him. He's the only one in the history of man who has ever figured that out. Write what you want to see. Because if you don't, you're not going to have any true passion in it, and it's not going to be done with any true artistry."
John Milius, the nearly always semi-blacklisted right wing gun owning scriptwriter who wrote Apocalypse Now, something people can't agree whether it's pro or anti-war, even though it's obviously descriptive and not prescriptive, who my original John Goodman avatar, Walter Sobchak, is based on.