Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.

Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.

Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.

Not everyone needs to be slammed into a category and locked there.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.