A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie - in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.

what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.

[Happiness is] a ghost, it’s a shadow. You can’t really chase it. It’s a by-product, a very pleasant side effect to a life lived well.

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.

When you're stuck on something creatively, you can't solve a problem, you go to a coffee shop.

We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.

God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.

I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.

Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.

A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change.

The effects of human rights education can be dramatic in awakening people to the value and power of their own lives, as shown in the following stories.

Unblemish'd let me live or die unknown; Oh, grant an honest fame, or grant me none!

If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning

Much suspected by me, Nothing proved can be

Don't count out other amazing programming like Frontline. You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet.

The fact is that you can't have a good relationship with a girl who hasn't settled things with her father.

I wasn't really comfortable reading until I was 12.

I've worked with everyone from Ice Cube to Snoop Dogg ... right across to working with pop stars like Justin Timberlake. Why those artists came to me is because they wanted my sound.

I like the fact that second person puts the reader in the story. It makes them, whether they like it or not, complicit in the action.