The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.
Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.
The thing I would most like to see invented is a way of teaching children and grown-ups the difference between right and wrong.
The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.
I have to do this my way.
There's no neutral language about travel. Either travel is described in ways that make it sound kind of shallow or just glossy or silly or a way for rich people to spend their time; or else travel is often described in quite derogatory ways, you know, like immigrants swarming across borders, for instance.
Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.
I'm not cynical or bitter in any way. Life's too short; you get ripped off, but if you hold a grudge, it's going to affect you. You take it on the chin, you learn, you try not to make the same mistakes.
You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way.
Beauty, like ice, our footing does betray; Who can tread sure on the smooth, slippery way: Pleased with the surface, we glide swiftly on, And see the dangers that we cannot shun.
I love getting baths and going to the Korean spas and getting pummeled and scrubbed, and its so hot in the sauna you can't even stand it. I have to do things in a pretty extreme way to calm down. So a Swedish massage is not going to do it! I need to know that they're in there with their thumbs and moving stuff around.
I don't think Hollywood was trying to do anything with me. In fact, they lost interest pretty quick. I think I got lucky, briefly, in the '90s, and it just so happened that those movies were the opportunities that came my way. Then it just kind of stopped.
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
There is no way now to get around some use of embryos. But my goal is to avoid using them.
There's no debate about the greenhouse effect, just like there's no debate about gravity. If someone throws a piano off the roof, I don't care what Sarah Palin tells you, get out of the way because it's coming down on your head.
I've heard time and again from small business owners in Ohio that extending bonus depreciation is the single biggest factor in allowing their businesses to grow. Allowing companies to use these tools for capital reinvestment is a common-sense way to encourage job creation.
Bush is going in the wrong way. And I dare say, that is what the strategy of his administration is, is just to wipe out government's purpose for any social and economic justice at all. And I'm going to take the country in an opposite direction than he's taking it.
My parents taught me the way to deal with being picked on was to be compassionate. I had to defend myself physically, but I had to be compassionate and understand the position of those abusing me. I had to figure it out and then rise above it.
Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.
I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.
The only way to eliminate the deficit in the long run is through growth.
I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.
For the last seven years, I have been racing the best in the world and making my way through the ranks. I am in that spot where I have got a real opportunity to produce something. I am not going to take it for granted because I know those guys will step it up.
I don't think I'm a great songwriter, but I think I've learned a lot about it, and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.
I was never the person who came up with a boom somehow. I worked slowly and consistently, making my way up the rankings, so there wasn't one special moment.
A big part of who I am is just the way I was raised. Nobody is better than anyone else, and if you really work hard, you might get lucky and get what you want.
I personally don't like guys who are super-muscly and stacked and overdo it in that way. Having a natural, healthy body is the best. It doesn't mean you have to be a certain size, because everybody's different.
Profit is one way that you can take pride in the way you publish things and insure that you can go on doing it.
The early ELP albums were pioneering in a way.
Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.
I always knew where I was going eventually, so it helped me to stay at home for three years. It helped me to develop my game. But it also helped me off the ice. Life here is way different, and I was able to get older.
Now I design what I want to wear, and it works that way.
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
We use tools such as email, not just as a way to keep in daily touch with family members who live in other cities, but also as a way to keep in touch with staff and members of the public.
I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didn't exist.
'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.
