A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people's lives, with real individuals.

I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

Out of the scabbard of the night By God's hand drawn Flashes his shining sword of light And lo the dawn!

Open-faced sandwiches take risks and live big and smile with all their teeth. These are the people I want to be around.

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft; and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

When you think about it, Alaska is also near the North Pole, so she must also be friends with Santa.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they’ll do in any scene you put them in.

We grew to know the meaning of love. That is what allowed me and my family to stay close together.

You have to love, without judgment, every actor that you're working with to make beauty.

Wearing a scrap of colored cloth around your neck, even though it serves no useful purpose, but which answers to the name of "tie."

It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.