Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

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

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

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.

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

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.