The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.

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

Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.

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.

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

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