Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

I'm dead, but I can't stop living.

It was hope, dying unsurprised.

My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.

Does the world have nothing inside but sorrow?

When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive; then they have the parts and the'be lost the whole, for the link that's missing was the living soul.

I shall die, but I will not kill.

An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality - the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else.

Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.

No one is going to hand you an organizational chart. You have to hand it to yourself.

If I did everything, I probably wouldn't be here talking to you. There aren't too many people who can actually double me, so I do most of my stunts though.