Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself – your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose – they want to keep you down.

Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.

People are more complicated than the masks they wear in society.

I want my movies to play in movie theaters. While festivals can fulfill a part of that, there's nothing like getting a week-long run for your movie. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get that.

The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.

I don't know that Brandy [Burre] would ever categorize herself as being trapped, but I felt like I saw her being trapped. When she's cleaning the room and she puts the labels on the toys, that was something that my wife, who's also friends with Brandy, was very adamant that we try to capture. My wife said that showed to her Brandy's creative outlet because she can't be creative in the ways that she used to be or that she maybe wants to be in the future.

One person reads the book, and cannot help telling a friend. That is vastly superior to any kind of advertisement, or clever magazine article. That is also the great power of the internet, where people share their opinions without the annoying screen of the media, and so much of the presence of my books has come from the Internet. It's a new era, a new form of war, and I embrace it.