Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.

Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

I'm going to write a whole pilot and see if anyone's interested, and if not then I'll just live out the tortured life instead of showing it on TV.

Develop a reputation as a person who, rather than talking a good game, actually plays a good game.

Life is too short. It's too precious. We have to live in this world, but we don't have to wallow in it. We don't have to fill our lives with all of this darkness.

You can disagree with someone on issues, but you should never get personal. Joe Biden has never gotten personal, to my knowledge, with a fellow senator.

We're not the paragons of virtue that we'd all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God will use suffering to expose the stuff of which we're made.

I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present

We live in a world of thought, but we think we live in a world of external experience.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

Ideally, anything one writes should have a social conscience: if you can write a story that thrills, and with a good message, that's the perfect type of a story.