When I hire actors I believe in their abilities.

You know, when you're isolated on set for like a month, people like to get rowdy.

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

The trappings of a religious cult tend to fall into candlelit ceremonies and robes and group chanting and singing and prayer.

What I learned from directing, I learned from soccer, where it's like a coach-player relationship.

When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of large group of conforming people.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

You can't write something to please someone.

A big fear of working with an actor that's never been a lead in a film before is that you're going to have to work really hard to pull a performance out of her.

In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

Struggles and challenges are ordinary, it's how you deal with them that can make you extraordinary.

We can accomplish great things by God’s grace.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might.

The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.

Admit when you're wrong. Shut up when you're right.

As a kid, I always went to therapists; the first time was when my parents were separated on my sixth birthday, then on and off since then.

I have never had an office that I work out of and work has become intertwined with my personal life.

Excuses are for losers, and winning is for winners, like you!

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.