Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

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.

Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality.

When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!

No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.