“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 lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.”

“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.”

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

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

“We rarely know where we are going; writing is a discovery.”

“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.”

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