I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.

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.

The formula of life is simple. It is the formula of giving - giving courage, attention, peace, love and comfort to yourself and the society.

I really care about where things are going. I care about what people are feeling and I like to ask the question why.

You have to have courage to stand up to your critics.

I find the evidence for the deity of Jesus and the reliability of the Bible to be powerful and persuasive, and that evidence has only gotten stronger over the years.

I doubt that more than two percent of professing Christians in the United States are truly born again.

So to some extent he [Barack Obama] is a victim of the expectations and the high hopes that we experienced.

I'm very spontaneous.

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.

Failure isn't a character quality. It's just an event. How you respond to failure is your character.

You never have a friend all figured out. Just when you think you know what makes them tick, they tock.