Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

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.

Wizards are always hungry.

Pardon me if, reading that, I want to laugh, because you want to relieve me of a fear I've never had. I've never thought that, as they say, you eat little children.

Whatever fills your heart with joy and fills your mind with love--that is your truth of love.

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

The true free-will ain't a matter of choosing one of many choices...but of creating variety of options, then deciding the best choice of all.

Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.

Hitler never bothered with restaurant reservations; he just dropped by. And somehow they always found him a table.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life.

If you're not bruised up, then you're not doing an action film in a real way.

When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.