Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.

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

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

(...)while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining.

No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.

When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.

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.

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

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.

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.

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.

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality,

Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.