“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….”

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

You see in others who you are.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

The first duty of a leader is opti­mism. How does your sub­or­di­nate feel after meet­ing with you? Does he feel uplifted? If not, you are not a leader.

When you’re smart on crime, you start off by recognizing that both the victim, first of all, the victim, but also the person who did the crime are both human.

To me the thing with ‘Grease’ was that it was the first movie that as a kid I wanted to get up and do what they were doing.

Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship

Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn’t going to work.

There were a lot of fences and walls existing in my life, literally and figuratively, and that was really not indicative of the kind of person that I’d always been. So, when I moved back to Seattle, the first thing I said was, “I will never live in fear again.”

The first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first.

One of the things that’s great about doing a show over and over again… is that you have to find ways to make it spontaneous, as though everything is happening for the first time… to continue to mine the material and find new things.