Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.

Taking time to look back, is a foundation on course to build a stable future.

I have no idea why, but I'm grinning back at her. This temperamental, wild creature in front of me who has the nerve to put me in my place.

To understand the future of technology, we need to begin with one fundamental truth: Technology is natural.

I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I've never viewed them in any way as being separable.

I don't believe in praying to win.

Don't believe what anyone tells you about yourself.

Complaining will not change things in your life; only action will. Make a list of all you need to do to change what doesn't work in your life and, little by little, begin making those changes.

Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat.

I had rather eleven died nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.