When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.

...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)

I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.

When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars - we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.