Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

Life is chaotic and meaningless, and you have to find your meaning. You must find the answer, you can't just live. That's the point of story: helping you find your meaning in life.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate--the ritual often exhausts them.

Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.

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.

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