Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

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.

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

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.

Your responsibility is your accurate response to the ability within you, when you respond less accurately than the ability you have it becomes irresponsibility.

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.

I think progress is a sort of comfortable disease, and we've got a media that says entertainment and celebrity, which isn't bad in itself but it stops the real issues coming forward.

We make a lot of mistakes for women, and we'll always do it again.

Superman/Wonder Woman, people expected, I guess, a lot of romance, or maybe something that wasnt emotionally deep. Who knows?

When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.

It is difficult to retain what you may have learned unless you should practice it. -Difficile est tenere quae acceperis nisi exerceas

[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

It was the worst period of my life. I had all this gigantic acceptance as a kid, and all of a sudden there was this monumental rejection.