The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.

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.

Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.

I get confused with all the rules in golf. Let's say you're playing in L.A. and your ball lands on a dead body. Is your relief one or two club lengths?

If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.

You throw thorns, falling in my silence they become flowers.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

I started natural farming after the war with just one small plot, but gradually I acquired additional acreage by taking over surrounding pieces of abandoned land and caring for them by hand.

Normally, if someone goes bankrupt, you wipe out the debt and get a fresh start. But that's not permitted with student loans. So the effect is to impoverish many graduates with very high debts.

The truth is never pure and rarely simple.

All human suffering concerns each human being.

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man and the man in every woman.