When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

Life is absurd. But there is one meaningful thing, one inarguable thing, and that is that there is suffering. Fine writing helps alleviate that suffering – and anything that puts meaning and beauty into the world in the form of story, helps people to live with more peace and purpose and balance, is deeply worthwhile.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.

Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue.