Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census', and people fall asleep.

Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

You tell me the dead are coming through a crack in my barn, but I shouldn’t worry?

I'm real excited. I'm so blessed to have so much peace and joy inside. I just can't keep quiet about it.

After working for so long on being sure of each other, sure of this thing, suddenly we were unsure again.

We're going to hear an earful, but it's going to be an earful of wonderment and happiness that people waited for for a long time.

When Yoko [Ono] and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters - you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers.

Everyone who shoots dance sequences does it in a different way. Everyone who shoots fight sequences does it in a different way.

The fact that I'd gone through my own transition as governor of Indiana and had been informed by that experience, I think was an asset.

I'm a darned good listener.

The Song of Love, the Song of Hate, the Songs of Praise and of Thanksgiving; I've learned them all, but there remains one called the Melody of Living.

Were I a cloud I'd gather My skirts up in the air, And fly I well know whither, And rest I well know where.