I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn't care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off.
He thought: Because when you tell a lie it must be to keep from saying a worse thing. Then lying is not a Sin and God will not punish you. (But what if God is one of them?)
A romance book is designed to tell you something about love–its ability to endure, forgive, go the extra mile, care about someone, put someone else first.
David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
This is a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party, which in too many cases has become so corporate and identified with corporate interests that you can't tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Yesterday Senator John Kerry changed his mind and now supports the ban on gay marriages. I'm telling you this guy has more positions than Paris Hilton.
I don't want to steal anybody's story. I very much want to use the stories that I hear to get lost in my mind, to tell a larger story.
The Congressional Budget Office tells us that Medicare spending has increased fivefold in the past 42 years, dramatically more than all other categories of federal spending.
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
Obviously I like pretty girls, but I'm also looking for someone who can take control. I know guys complain about girls telling them what to do, but I think we all kind of enjoy it.
I want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart. They get so many messages that tell them the most important thing is to be beautiful.
People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
I believe in Father Frost. But not too deeply. But anyway, you know, I'm not one of those people who are able to tell the kids that Father Frost does not exist.
I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.
All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.
Before my son was born, I use to tell people that I was looking forward to no longer being the star of my own movie; then Harry came along, and it was like, 'Whoa, I'm really not!'
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that 'The Hurt Locker' relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.
There's a tendency to fall into certain habits, but if you tell yourself not to do that and if you don't stay there too long - I think if you start staying for too long, you tend to fall into certain bad habits, and I tried not to do that.
People can have the best of intentions when they tell their loved ones how they should be living their lives. But often times, when we are in struggle, we are seeking to be supported, not solved.
Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.
