When does she do all this thinking? We're together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We've been married 48 years.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe - you can't take a taxi.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

Jean Paul Sartre says in "No Exit" that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.

I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

It's all about letting the story take over.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.

When feeling is divested of the feeler and the felt, it shines as love; when seeing is divested of the seer and the seen, it shines as beauty.

My country has been very good to me; I must be good to my country.

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.