As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

I’m 5’11, so when I wear heels, it’s definitely a really good view that I have. I’m, like, 6’2 when I wear heels, so I tend to wear cowboy boots a lot.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

The way I define ‚intelligent design‘ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

I always was a Christian… whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

I actually don’t want a throne at all, because I don’t view myself as a queen; I view myself as one of my fans.

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.