God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration….

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility..

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degener….

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place..

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks ….

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression..

When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up i….

Story is morally neutral. It can express profound truth or propaganda. The two greatest political storytellers of the 20th Century were Winston Churc….

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse….

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brill….

The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story..

Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work..

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas..

No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best..

Influence is just persuasion in slow motion..

Story is about originality, not duplication.

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint..

The students realize that it's their life I'm talking about: it's out of balance, they're struggling to put it into balance. How are they going to do….

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society..

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, ….

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking..