Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.

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.

My Miracle, living through a Traumatic brain Injury

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

Unlike any other time in our history, we have to know that staying in school and getting an education is the most important thing you can do.

Please remember, it is what you are that heals, not what you know.

You can wish for things in the future to be different, but in this moment you have to accept things as they are.

I never expected to be a model. I never expected to be a stylist. Or a designer.

If you are not a praying person, you are not a Christian.

She screamed, the high scream that was neither human nor animal but something terrible in between, the sort of sound that you never forget no matter how many beautiful things you hear afterward.

If you want to enjoy intimacy, you must learn to enjoy pain.

I think that, you know, when we start talking about the Tea Party, people want to marginalize that into some kind of organization or party, but it really isn't.