“We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God….We’re here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.”

Creativity is a continual surprise.

You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

You fail only if you stop writing.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

There’s no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

You’ve been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

I’m definitely guilty of thinking something is funny but thinking the audience won’t. Then three years later I will finally try it and it’ll kill them. I got to give them more credit.

I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will.

My son says I never tell stories about anyone who’s living.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.