I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.

It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census', and people fall asleep.

Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

Life is an adventure, you only win if you are bold and courageous.

Efficient self-destruction is what it is. Clean and neat. Almost surgical in its precision.

I find great lighting and a squint of the eyes makes anyone look better.

I am comfortable in the uncomfortable.

We live one day at a time and scratch where it itches.

The way I look at it, movies are a different medium for storytelling than books.

I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

It is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts hamming it up.

The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.