Remember that post-coital moment between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall? The one in which he says “well, as Balzac once said, there goes another novel.”

I can’t find the link or attest to the veracity of the following, but back in the late ’90s or early aughts I definitely read about a testy conversation between Bugsy collaborators Warren Beatty and James Toback. Beatty was angry at Toback for being too slow with the script, and at one point he told him to stay away from women until the work was finished. “You’re telling me this?” Toback replied. Beatty was adamant about sex depleting creative energy. I can’t recall the exact quote but Beatty allegedly said something along the lines of “I never come when I’m in the middle of making a film.”

This feeds right into a Steven Spielberg quote from a May 1977 interview with Interview magazine’s Susan Pile and Tere Tereba: