Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.

Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.

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.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

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

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer's labor goes into designing the story designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought.

When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.