An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census', and people fall asleep.

Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

Yes, you may have your cake and eat it too. I will only take the rest of the world along with all the other cakes in it, thank you!

Your private thoughts give birth to your public acts.

Cheer up the worst is yet to come.

Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

In my plays I want to look at life at the commonplace of existence as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.

I make music to bring the dead to life for a couple minutes and then let it go.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

It's great to be great, but its greater to be human.