The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.

We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.

Spontaneous insanity is the real bliss! It's sad that we are honored for playing sane, serious, safe, miserable and controlling in this poor world.

She can go places we cannot, associate with people we cannot, understand things about society types and women that we never can. (Why Mr. Burke hires Violet Strange.)

Not every one of us sees the beauty of the stars and innocence of the moon by looking at sky.

I like to believe that I've got a lot of guardian warriors sittin' on my shoulder including my dad.

Victory needs conflict as its preface.

I actually like talking.

It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.

The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.

The one to distrust is the person who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried and the trivial.

Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.