Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.

We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.

An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger?

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!

Soccer matches in Europe have riot police. Metal is just people sloshing around drunk and sloppy and having fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. It is a great outlet for aggression.

After all my various relationships I find myself now home alone.

I don't want everyone to like me, and I don't choose who likes me. You have to give them the choice, give them the option.

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

It's an immense amount of pressure, celebrity itself.