I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Any list of the greatest screenwriters of all time will likely include names such as Francis Ford Coppola, Nora Ephron, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Charlie Kaufman. There’s a good chance that Eric Roth will also be in the mix. The prolific screenwriter has been nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, for “Forrest Gump” (for which he won the Oscar), “The Insider,” “Munich,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “A Star Is Born,” and “Dune.” The quote above comes from “Benjamin Button,” a movie that was particularly important to Roth as both his parents died while he was writing it, and his emotional state at the time helped shape the film. Roth has said that you don’t necessarily need to write what you know, as the old writing adage goes. Instead, he suggests that you “write what you see and feel and hear. You take from your experience.”