We do many things we shouldn't in the course of a life. It doesn't make them right or wrong, just a part of who we are.

If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

I was punched breathless by the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer.

I am convinced that any attempt to restore harmony in the world can only rest on the renewal of personal responsibility.

There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.

A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.

Some people are just afraid of what's different. It doesn't mean different is bad. It just means different is different.

He seemed to be waiting for a miracle to save him from the depths his life had reached and take him to a land of dreams.

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well.

I think I'm less disciplined than a lot of other people, I'm afraid, but on the other hand, I've written a lot of books.

Life can very genuinely and realistically pile things on. It doesn't dole out the heartache and pain, or joy, perfectly.

People complain about Hollywood comedians, but I feel like I selected a tremendous group, ones who aren't fame-obsessed.

When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?

You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

Every day, we have to strive to be better people. Some days we give in to weakness, and sometimes we give in to strength.

The most important decision you can make as a showrunner when you're doing a pilot is who's in it and who's directing it.

I think that the so-called average person often exhibits a great deal of heroism in getting through an ordinary day . . .

The child from 9 to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.

I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.

I didn't just want to be the one who was always looking around at the weird family members. I wanted to make my mistakes.

I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.

I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.

I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

That's why I've come to you, to seek release from a curse of misery and horror against which I'm powerless to fight alone.

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

First of all I can only focus on one creative project at a time. I wish I could focus on two, because I really only write.

If all you leave in the library is books that you think speak to everyone, what are you going to have? You'd have nothing.

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.

There's something a lot more self-conscious feeling when there's cameras coming in for close-ups. It makes you very aware.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

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