“The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.”

Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

If you’re really driven and you want something deep, hard enough in life, you’re going to get it.

All the most successful people nowadays who are truly successful and innovative in their field are not people motivated by money.

You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.

We must create our own world or we will die from inaction.

The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.

Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.

You’re not going to be persistent and tenacious enough if you don’t love what you’re doing. If it’s not something that excites you, that appeals to you deep down inside.

Everybody in life is struggling for power, and some people use morality and righteousness as a weapon, while others use different means, even passive aggression. From a distance, we are all fighting, and I am looking at this from a distance.

Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initative on his side.

Nothing is stable in the realm of power, and even closest of friends can be transformed into the worst of enemies.

Fear creates its own self-fulfilling dynamic- as people give into it, they lose energy and momentum. Their lack of confidence translates into inaction that lowers confidence levels even further, on and on.

You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, by heading in a direction that others seem to fear.

Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.

It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

I remember one time that I was filming a scene in which my character rides through Troy on a chariot. I just looked around at this incredible set thinking ‘This is the life’.

I was just genuinely shy. I’d always been a shy kid.

God is using all of your experiences, both good and bad, to develop your character to match your calling.

I’m often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don’t think I’ve actually cried watching myself.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

How do you project a character if you don’t have a sense of where she is from? I’ve always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.