Perhaps something like Facebook couldn't have been invented by somebody who goes out five nights a week and has a ton of friends and makes friends really easily.

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.

Poets find their voices when they articulate the wishes of the dead, especially those slain as sacrificial talismans to a larger frame of existence.

The scenery doesn't necessarily improve in proportion to how far you travel or how much you spend.

An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes.

Write as well as you can and finish what you start.

A good scientific theory should be explicable to a barmaid.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

We have a centrist nationalist group of people in this country, lots of them, and we have a socialist group of people in this country, lots of them. And that's not, to me, the American idea.

If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.

When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.

Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness - a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster children into strength and athletic proportion.