If you can’t play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you’re condemned to hum the same old tune.
In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.
The Business story is designed to trigger the listener to take an effective action. If it doesn’t, the story fails.
Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.
In comedy laughter settles all arguments.
Oh, by the way, I tend to use a lot of profanities. I do that for a reason: I like it.
It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.
Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
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 it?
The universal erosion of values has lead to the universal erosion of story.
Leaders use story to author the future.
The dirty secret of art is you don’t have to show people your bad writing. That’s what we have the delete key for.
Ninety percent of what we create is not our best work.
We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we’re surprised by its relative ease. We’re left to wonder why we dreaded it until we realize that most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.
When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you’ll have choices galore.
Don’t be didactic – don’t write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the ‘idea’ dynamically and without preaching.
Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.
Of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.
Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.