Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Sorrow can be a bully.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes

I think that's what you say when you can't have something you want, isn't it? You say you don't want it in the first place.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being.

The world is what you believe it to be, and it changes as you change.

Stay away from restaurants that have menus in five languages. Thats always a tourist trap. You want to eat where the locals eat.

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

The code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon prescribed this punishment for a doctor convicted of inept surgery: amputation of the hands.

If you're not a Christian, you're going to hell. It's not unloving to say that. it's unloving not to say that.

The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.

The big shots are not the only ones who are important. Remember, you can't sell anything on Wall Street unless someone digs it up somewhere else first.