What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

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.

We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.

If you don't break your own standards, you will not reach new heights and levels. It is by stretching our limits that we move beyond boundaries. Keep improving!

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.

Nothing will end war unless the peoples themselves refuse to go to war.

There has to a certain responsibility, whether it's TV news, online news, to sort out opinion from fact.

I take every job on its merits.

I hate crap, I like craftsmanship

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

You never do things thinking you will make a big statement. It just happens sometimes and you are lucky.

Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.