Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

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

Life is chaotic and meaningless, and you have to find your meaning. You must find the answer, you can't just live. That's the point of story: helping you find your meaning in life.

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.

God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.

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.

People are like hot potatoes, if they don't make you happy, drop them.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

In an active life is sown the seed of wisdom... And age, if it has not esteem, has nothing.

God is only where you let Him in.

Another important thing to learn is that kids have a personality that has nothing to do with you.

Love is a choice. Total forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling-at least at first-but is rather an act of the will. It is the choice to tear up the record of wrongs we have been keeping.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority.

You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you'll never be successful.

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.