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

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.

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

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

The mark of a master is to select only a few moments, but give us a lifetime.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

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