Superhero movies are so famous because of the metaphor that they trigger in one's self about who you could be if things were different.

My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully, but that everybody would love me, too. I think that's intrinsic to fantasy - fantasy is fantasy.

I have a real pet peeve for women who play damaged characters but don't look damaged.

Any sympathy won for Aileen Wuornos based on a lie is not sympathy at all. The question is, can we have sympathy for the circumstances of someone's life? That's what I was interested in.

There's an idea that action movies are more attractive to one gender than the other or different kinds of people or whatever. The truth is action is not any different than any other part of a story.

New kinds of heroics need to be celebrated - like love, thoughtfulness, forgiveness, diplomacy - or we're not going to get there.

The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

One does not have to stand again the gale. One yields and becomes part of the wind.

Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state.

You can be tops in Australia and be unheard of everywhere else

There is such a gauntlet of risk that you go through when you climb up to Everest.

Once fear enters your life - it will take you in one of two directions: empowerment or panic.

Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.

I think it's more comforting to look in the past because you can understand it better, and there are labels for it often.

It has become cheaper to look for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than in the ground.