Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school. - David Mamet

Writers are asked, 'How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?' The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.

Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies.

We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.