Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren't that many tour-de-force roles out there for women.

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.

Self-consciousness isn't just A curse. It is part of THE curse.

Greatness isn't something you should always be chasing. There's greatness within all of us, and I think that's what we forget.

I think it is important to stay open to the world around you, so that you are constantly in a state of growth and evolution, which can only happen through inspiration.

The scalpel won't make you happy.

I came from dinner, went downtown with my friends, the elevator was down, I ran down the hall toward my room at 10 at night, having had two glasses of wine.

Our moods and insights are transitory. This current is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

A man is an angel that has gone deranged.

Have the boldness to tell yourself the truth - every bit of it.

Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.