You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes.
Your success is not based on the success of others.
Forgive yourself for your faults and your mistakes and move on.
Death is not the end of your time.
Time never wait for your arguments
Knowledge is your operating system.
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
You must stick to your conviction, but be ready to abandon your assumptions.
A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play's not like that at all. 'Abandonment's not mine - it's everyone's. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
What I have is P.H. positive chronic myeloid leukemia, which is an aberration in your white blood cells.
The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.
Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.
I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.'
So you get two good hours on the field about every day, you get about an hour and a half in the meeting room and that's pretty much all you need to thoroughly coach your team.
It was psychobabbler Abraham Maslow who wrote of the phenomena of self-actualization. What Maslow failed to grasp is that reaching true self-actualization can only be ultimately achieved when you have your own brand of ammunition.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
The concept of making a movie in which the director dictates is kind of exotic - and absolutely not truthful. Directing means allowing a great deal of collaboration and listening and having the ability to change your mind.
I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.
