The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.

No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can't be.

The students realize that it's their life I'm talking about: it's out of balance, they're struggling to put it into balance. How are they going to do it?

Story is about originality, not duplication