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

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

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

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

True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk...

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,...

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.

If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.

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.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

When talented people write badly, it’s generally for one of two reasons: Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they’re driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people...

Good story’ means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task…But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage,...

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it’s delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.

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

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

Most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

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

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it’s an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our...

Secure writers don’t sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it’s the key to victory over fear and it’s cousin, depression.

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.

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

A fine work of art – music, dance, painting, story – has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

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...

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.