What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
No civilization, including Plato’s, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
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.
Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.
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.
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.
In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
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.
The Law of Diminishing Returns is true of everything in life, except sex, which seems endlessly repeatable with effect.
Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
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.
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 lives…Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.
When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information ….
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.
Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Classical design is a mirror of the human mind. It’s how we see the world.