“. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .”

Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds?

That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings

Once the dust clears you will be standing tall, a champion, a victor. NOTHING will be able to knock you down once you’ve taken the biggest hits this life has to offer, so come on life, BRING IT!

I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners.

One word was uttered and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

My advice to teens is to try and do something that scares you every day because it’s the only way you can test how far you can really go.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

Man is capable of every great heroism; it was man who found a means of conquering the formidable obstacles of his environment, establishing himself lord of the earth, and laying the foundations of civilization.

Every relationship should eventually become a long-term relationship. Any director that I meet now isn’t just a director. He’s potentially a friend, and someone I can call to do a project that I want or that I have.

I’ve driven just about every kind of car there is.