Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm interested in human behavior, and what happened in my family life is definitely not a unique story. There are aspects of that I'm sure you can see through the work. But I'm just looking for something that touches me.
I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.
To me Vivien Leigh was a tragic heroine of classic proportions: chosen, blessed and abandoned by the gods. Obstinately she tried to control and defy her destiny and to know her story is to be inspired by pity and terror.
With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he's like, yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out.
When I have been speaking to people in Braintree and at other places in the country they really didn't buy into Labour's economic offer, didn't buy into scare stories about the NHS and clearly didn't trust Jeremy Corbyn.
I guess you never know what's going to come at you in life, but the answer is never to crawl into a box and throw in the towel. There is good that can come from anything, even if it's just a later laugh and a good story.
Outside of my family, I was always inspired by true heroic stories of leadership and survival. For example, the story of the Shackleton expedition, when their ship became lodged in the Antarctic ice pack while exploring.
Patience is the most necessary quality for business, many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request. It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.
I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story.
My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community - with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people - so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.
Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.
Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that there are a limited amount of human stories that we tell - there's about seven of them - and of course, there's variations on those stories, and they can take place in infinite places.
I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
I've been very fortunate in my career to work across a lot of different mediums. I've hosted, I've narrated, I've acted in television, miniseries, film - all of which are very, very different in the way they tell stories.
Your ultimate life experience and legacy is being built moment by moment, day by day. Your story is being crafted by your every action, all leading somewhere, all leading to what one hopes will be a magnificent crescendo.
Taking Batman globally, not everything is going to have the same flavor as Gotham City; some places are going to be a lot more bright and airy. I would say that his stories are more broad, I guess I would put it that way.
If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
I'm just looking as always for something that's stimulating and I hope to find a good story that's a challenge, whether it's big or small. Or that it finds me. I don't have like a career plan. Maybe I should, but I don't.
I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.
My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.
There's a positive side to film and television, the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you, hopefully, and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.
I began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public's idea of this myth comes from a million different places... I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story.
The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories.
Christy Barritt's novel, Hazardous Duty, is a delightful read from beginning to end. The story's fresh, engaging heroine with an unusual occupation hooked me, and I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend Hazardous Duty.
How many stories have you read that aren't true, stories about me and Angie being married or fighting or splitting up? And when we don't split up, there's a whole new round that we've made up and we're back together again!
However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.
It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.
I treasure the Bible. I live in it and work on it all the time. But it is not the word of God. It's the tribal story of a particular people, and the best thing about that story is that the story keeps growing and evolving.
A friend of mine, a poet, Rebecca Wolff recently said to me, "You know, your stories are really voice-driven," and I guess I knew that already, but it's so true that I can't get something going unless I can hear the voice.
And I like being able to go back and forth, and I don't really care if it's a small budget or big budget or studio or independent, as long as it's got a story that's compelling and there's enough money to make the picture.
It happened like this. I was stolen from an airport. Taken from everything I knew, everything I was used to. Taken to sand and heat, dirt and danger. And he expected me to love him. This is my story. A letter from nowhere.
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes.
Life is a B Movie: it's stupid and it's strange, it's a directionless story, the dialogue is lame, but in the 'he said she said' sometimes there's some poetry, if you turn your back long enough and let it happen naturally.
Sometimes strange and wonderful things will pop into my head. And sometimes I will see something in the world that is the beginning of a story. I always have a notebook with me so that I can write down what I see and hear.
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
It was very difficult to go farther than that in the arguments with my father because he would always have a story or a justification to tell you, which I never considered valid because there is not an excuse for violence.
The public doesn't know what to believe anymore. We don't know what stories are supposedly true, this idea of 'fake news.' We watch it on what I guess you would call a split-focus. It's half entertainment and half mystery.
It is a political thriller. It's very action packed and it's very exciting, but at the same time it's a very big soulful love story about longing and loss. They're not separate, they're completely dependent on one another.
I was overjoyed when I was offered the title role in 'Well Done Abba.' I was ready for the role even before I heard the story because you don't ask questions when it is Shyam Benegal's film. It is the chance of a lifetime.
I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.
I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'
There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites.
No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.
It was what became something of a pattern in the first couple of years of the Clinton White House and maybe even longer, where information would drip, drip, drip, drip, drip out which would keep stories alive, alive, alive.
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.