The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn't, the story fails.

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.

Success does not chase after you

The world has gotten so interwoven.

I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did.

Some people eat, some people drink, some people smoke. I Pledge.

It's a mandate for you to do in office what you said you would do on the campaign trail.

When I need to push myself, I think of all those nicely polished trophies waiting to be lifted up by the winner - and how that winner might be me.

To name a thing is easy: the difficulty is to discern it before its appearance.

Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day when the failure will succeed. I am not a failure. I will act now.

The drugs were the most important thing to me.

When I first started doing comedy, there was no such thing as a room that had black people and white people in it. That didn't exist.