Art Should Be A Place Of Hope.

I Was Being Paid To Do What I Loved, And There's No Gig On Earth Better Than That; It's Like A License To Steal.

The Story Is The Only Thing That's Important. Everything Else Will Take Care Of Itself. It's Like What Bowlers Say. You Hear Writers Talk About Character Or Theme Or Mood Or Mode Or Tense Or Person. But Bowlers Say, If You Make The Spares, The Strikes Will Take Care Of Themselves. If You Can Tell A Story, Everything Else Becomes Possible. But Without Story, Nothing Is Possible, Because Nobody Wants To Hear About Your Sensitive Characters If There's Nothing Happening In The Story. And The Same Is True With Mood. Story Is The Only Thing That's Important.

A Tragedy Is A Tragedy, And At The Bottom, All Tragedies Are Stupid. Give Me A Choice And I'll Take A Midsummer Night's Dream Over Hamlet Every Time. Any Fool With Steady Hands And A Working Set Of Lungs Can Build Up A House Of Cards And Then Blow It Down, But It Takes A Genius To Make People Laugh.

Men Who Find Themselves Late Are Never Sure. They Are All The Things The Civics Books Tell Us The Good Citizen Should Be: Partisans But Never Zealots, Respectors Of The Facts Which Attend Each Situation But Never Benders Of Those Facts, Uncomfortable In Positions Of Leadership But Rarely Unable To Turn Down A Responsibility Once It Has Been Offered . . . Or Thrust Upon Them. They Make The Best Leaders In A Democracy Because They Are Unlikely To Fall In Love With Power.

I Believe In Evil, But All My Life I've Gone Back And Forth About Whether Or Not There's An Outside Evil, Whether Or Not There's A Force In The World That Really Wants To Destroy Us, From The Inside Out, Individually And Collectively.