QUOTE: "I’m just a man that has used what I’ve learned in this life and I’ve tried to put it in film. I don’t want to just do film to make a movie for people to see; to blow up something, to kill somebody, explosions. None of that is attractive to me because what I’ve tried to do with my work and with my life is inspire and motivate people because I’ve come through too much h‑‑‑ to be able to sit in this seat. I have a tremendous debt to pay so I want to just pay it forward and pass it on to other people; that’s why I keep doing positive movies. This is what I know for sure; you reap what you sow. That’s why I think I’ve been so successful; God is just blessing me and honoring everything that I’m doing."

—director Tyler Perry (I Can Do Bad All by Myself), on what motivates him to tell the stories that he does

QUOTE: "I didn’t like what was on TV in terms of sitcoms—it had nothing to do with the color of them—I just didn’t like any of them. I saw little kids, let’s say 6 or 7 years old, white kids, black kids. And the way they were addressing the father or the mother, the writers had turned things around, so the little children were smarter than the parent or the caregiver. They were just not funny to me. I felt that it was manipulative and the audience was looking at something that had no responsibility to the family. … I wanted to take the house back. … I wanted to … show people that this is parenting, and this is home, and this is deep."

—Bill Cosby, reflecting on what he hoped The Cosby Show (which aired from 1984 to 1992) would accomplish

QUOTE: "Today’s storytellers … are justifying bad-story fodder by claiming that it mirrors real life. But here’s the thing: We already have real life. Personally, I have loads of it. I have mundane, banal, morose and boring people all around me. I need better than that from stories. That’s the whole point of them. We’ve got real life, and it’s not healing. I think it was Benjamin Disraeli who said that we need extraordinary heroes in our stories and plays so that we can be good to the guy next door. A super individual shames us into good behavior in real life. Take Mother Teresa; she scooped dirty, indigent people out of the gutter, even though they smelled bad and had maggots on them. She shames me into not snapping at my husband when he does something stupid. The extraordinary example of the hero shames us into mere civility."

—Barbara Nicolosi, founder of Act One, an organization that trains Christians in screenwriting and movie production

A new study titled American Nones: Profile of the No Religion Population indicates that those who don’t identify with any religion now account for 15% of the U.S. population. Researchers at Trinity College found that 19% of men and 12% of women consider themselves religion-free. Among those ages 18 to 29, 22% eschew any connection with any particular belief system. Trinity researcher Kosmin Keysar said of the findings, "There are so many misconceptions about who the Nones are. They’re not New Age searchers or spiritual or even hardened atheists. They’re a stew of agnostics, deists and rationalists. They sound more like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine. Their very interesting enlightenment approach is like the Founding Fathers’ kind: Skeptical about organized religion and clerics while still holding to an idea of God."

QUOTE: "Christianity, I think, gets confused a lot of times with church. Church is a byproduct, I think, of Christianity. Christianity is a one-on-one relationship with you and Christ. It’s great to have a stress-free life—a lot of that has to do with my relationship with Christ, but I don’t see why that means I can’t be an artist. I’m sort of the opposite of a wolf in lamb’s clothing. I’m a lamb in wolf’s clothing."

—Vincent Furnier, better known as rocker Alice Cooper, who’s currently in the midst of his Theatre of Death tour

Zombies are cool, but God is a downer. That’s according to a study conducted by the dating site okcupid.com. After tallying the responses of 500,000 singles, OkCupid found that short, concise, communiqués about interests in things such as video games, music and even zombies were generally met with positive reactions. And while dropping the names "Allah" or "Jesus" was acceptable as well, mentioning "God" had a negative impact upon romantic fortunes.

QUOTE: "You could be forgiven for thinking we’re in the midst of an unprecedented madness for vampires. ’True Blood Season Premiere Looking to Capitalize Off of Vampire Craze,’ headlined the Associated Press in June. ’CW joins vampire trend with [Vampire] Diaries,’ announced the Philadelphia Inquirer last week. The Hartford Courant asks, ’Why Vampires Now?’ A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it’s hard to think of a period when we weren’t in the middle of a vampire craze."

—Slate writers Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson, who examined vampire stories’ prevalence in popular culture for the last 50 years. They concluded that the relatively few "Garlic Years" when these tales receded in popularity were inevitably followed by a resurgence of interest in all things vampire. "If history is any guide," they write, "these plush times of vampire mania will soon end with a run of atrocious imitations, followed by a few years of peace and quiet. Don’t despair if it happens again. They’ll be back."

What does it take to enable 12 million users to play the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft? By the numbers: 4,600 staffers, 75,000 CPU cores and a truly eye-popping 1.3 million petabytes of memory (which translates to more than 1 billion megabytes).

A new British study suggests that "tech addiction" is a growing problem among teens, a problem that interferes with their concentration and encourages them to cheat. About 63% of the 11- to 18-year-olds polled said they felt addicted to the Internet. More than half said they felt addicted to their cell phones. About 17% said they used their phones three hours or more on any given day, and 39% admitted that texting was hurting their ability to write coherently elsewhere. A whopping 84% said they’ve regularly copied information from the Internet and pasted it right into their homework.

By late 2008, 20% of U.S. households had ditched landline telephones to rely exclusively on cell phones, up from 7% who had made the choice to go mobile-only in the first half of 2005. That statistic comes courtesy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of all places, which collects the data because CDC researchers only use landlines for their health surveys.

QUOTE: "Disrespect for cadavers is one thing, but filming [an apparent prank involving a dead person] and putting it on YouTube is another. It undermines the credibility of our profession. "

—Dr. Katherine Chretien, of the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center, commenting on a study she led that examined how some of today’s medical students are posting unethical and unprofessional content on websites such as YouTube and Facebook, as well as in personal blogs