Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.
So, it's always different. Some stuff, you want to do because it's a part that you've never played. It's always for story. Sometimes there's a story that you really dig, but there's no part that you're interested in. Sometimes you read a story and you say, "I could do that. I've never done that before. I could do play that part.
I'm not a malicious person. When you get past the tattoos and leather, I give people a fair shake. There are periods when I've sowed some wild oats, no doubt about it. And I can party with some of the heavyweights. There are some stories about me that, yeah, where there's smoke there's fire. But sometimes the smoke is just smoke.
Black excellence is a thing. People - from Beyonce Knowles to Venus and Serena Williams to folks you haven't heard of - are into it. It's less a movement than a standard: believers set the bar high not only for themselves but also for others who share their vision, especially when it pertains to black history, stories, and style.
Disney is a huge presence when it comes to fairy tales because he’s made of them such brilliant artifacts in terms of movie-making. But it’s very hard to ignore what he’s done to them. I'm not interested in denigrating Disney or even commenting on him very much. I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with the stories myself.
As far as superhero stories, what's appealing is of course that aspect of wish fulfillment. I mean, you start out reading them as a kid, and a couple things jump out at you - there are heroes out there, and you wish you could run into a phone booth and change your life, or be like Peter Parker and put on a mask and become a hero.
As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work.
The agentive mind is not only active in nature, but it seeks out dialogue and discourse with other active minds. And it is through this dialogic, discursive process that we come to know the Other and his points of view, his stories. We learn an enormous amount not only about the world but about ourselves by discourse with Others.
I was working for a Swedish TV show - I'm Swedish - who basically did kind of spectacular stories. It was almost like CBS '60 Minutes,' but a Swedish version where we actually did travel quite a lot. After a while, I realized that travel is the most fun part of this, so why not do it for a longer time and just go off and explore?
You Can't Kill the Spirit resonates with the voices and power of women around the globe who have refused to be either passive or violent but instead act firmly and imaginatively to oppose oppression in its many guises. A wonderful tonic for activists and a treasure for those who teach, these stories bring women's history to life.
Telling stories with visuals is an ancient art. We've been drawing pictures on cave walls for centuries. It's like what they say about the perfect picture book. The art and the text stand alone, but together, they create something even better. Kids who need to can grab onto those graphic elements and find their way into the story.
What I think is great about Pippin, specifically, and I wouldn't make this generalization about all musicals, is that it is about how we tell stories and the way stories are very subjective. How we tell some things and leave other things out in the way The Princess Bride is or The Wizard of Oz is, which both have a framing device.
I would like to be known for honest, relatable writing and stories that that are real. There's just this shift I think is happening in a lot of society right now where being your most real self, however embarrassing or vulnerable or weird that is, is the coolest. I feel like that's what Lena Dunham's about and Amy Schumer's about.
Naturally, my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by 'feminist.' In the beginning, I used to say, 'Well, of course I'm a feminist.' But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not.
We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.
We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.
I like something where I can really use my imagination and be an active participant in the construction of the monster and usually that's in the world of the supernatural or the world of the fantastic, so that's why those kinds of stories about demons and the supernatural appeal to me or maybe I'm really interested in that subject.
When you're guest-starring on another show, it really requires you to jump through hoops in a way, because you're servicing the stories of the main characters. You have to be able to portray a lot of different elements. You show up and get on board and get on their journey; you have to be flexible as to what they need for the role.
I am far more of a loner than people would imagine. But I am the most gregarious and socially interactive loner you ever met. The thing is, I am fascinated by people's stories and I'm very talkative and can't ever say no to anything or anyone, so I tend to over-socialize, to give away too much of my time to the many people I adore.
No matter how public your work is, it's just a relationship with yourself. And you have to create a little sacred space inside yourself to treasure that... because when you die, that's still what you have. It's what you're born with and what you leave with. It's kind of a story of the way you accompanied yourself through your life.
I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.
Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences - the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they're going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion.
At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn't do anything with my classmates.
She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.
In particular, I argue that in both evolution and creation we have rival religious responses to a crisis of faith-rival stories of origins, rival judgments about he meaning of human life, rival sets of moral dictates, and above all what theologians call rival eschatologies-pictures of the future and of what lies ahead for humankind.
So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.
Only a few bloggers have the audience and credibility to effectively break stories, pressure the traditional media, incubate new ideas, or raise real money. These influential bloggers are usually sharp, opinionated, and focused on the world 'offline.' They refuse to view events through the solipsistic blinders of their own websites.
True stories are always good because they're so odd, and so unlikely. It's always good to have a world that people don't know about - a world that hasn't yet been done. It's like treading on fresh snow. You're the first one there. It always feels good to be dealing with a period of history or a world that no one else has dealt with.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
It's a funny thing about stories. It doesn't feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven't got it yet, because somewhere out there, there's that perfect thing -- the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you've always been heading for, but never expected to go.
I grew up in the church, and I always kind of knew Bible stories and knew the Sunday school answers, but when I was a freshman in high school I joined youth group, and that's when I started to see radical love; that's when I started to see what Christian community is supposed to look like and what fellowship is supposed to look like.
I don't know what to say to people. It's become so big. It's become part of the cultural environment. For the first and second Twiglight, I knew exactly what to say to people. If you don't know what the story is by now, then you've probably never been to the cinema before. How about, "Why not go to the cinema for once?" I don't know.
Great stories happen all around you every day. At the time they’re happening, you don’t think of them as stories. You probably don’t think about them at all. You experience them. You enjoy them. You learn from them. You’re inspired by them. They only become stories if someone is wise enough to share them. That’s when a story is born.
I could direct a very decent Holocaust film, but I don't have the same experience as a young boy who was rocked to sleep in the lap of a grandmother who had a tattooed number on her arm, who told him stories of the people who disappeared, the relatives she never saw again, as he drifted off with his cheek nestled next to that number.
In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gender, demographic, and psychographic-agnostic. It's an all-purpose, everyone wins tool.
The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side.
I'm a lifelong movie addict, and one of my favorite projects is making replica props and costumes. Nearly every one of these - from R2D2 to Hellboy's revolver - ends with the paint job. And it's not just cosmetic. The paint literally tells a story: what this thing is made of, where it's been, what it's been used for, and for how long.
I like to have a much greater base and know a lot more about my character before I begin to fill the person. So a lot of it really entails sit-downs with them, determining who she is, where she came from, and why she reacts a certain way, and then I was really able to expand upon a lot of that and create a lot of that story on my own.
Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances?
I think many times news organizations, whether it's for lack of resources or something else, cover the headlines and don't follow up, even though the story continues for the people living there - they can't leave. I think it's critical that they do these follow-up stories to realize that there is still suffering, and the need is dire.
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
The stage, the screen, the novel, casual conversation, the street discussion, and too often the fireside intimacies are punctuated with blasphemy, to which may be added, as of the same nature, coarse, ribald jokes, foul stories, and low small talk. Some would have us believe that profanity is a sign of masculinity and emotion maturity.
In my work, there is a lot of storytelling. The storytelling is not a new thing. Back in the [Howard] Thurston days, the [Harry] Houdini days, the [Harry] Blackstone days, it was stories, but the stories were, "We're going to the Egyptian temples, and we're going to vanish the Prince of Thebes," and, "On my last trip to the Orient ..."
The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.
I like to multitask. I love the process of the storytelling in television. I love the serial. Even my stab at doing a procedural show was still very much serialized. I'm such a serialized storyteller. I feel like the story never ends. I want it to go and go and go. However, with cable and streaming now it's endless. You can do anything.
Lore is my favorite kind of story. Because it's not only historical, it's a lie everyone knows is a lie but tells anyway. I love that. Of course every story I tell is true. Completely true. Completely and utterly at least five-eighths of the way to being true, which is truer than any piece of lore and truer than most truths you'll hear.
I always tell this story: When I started, the woman went to the store to buy a dress. She saw it in pink and red, and then she remembered that the husband, who is probably going to pay for the dress, loves it in pink. So she buys the pink. Today, the same woman goes to the store and remembers the husband likes pink, and she buys the red.
I also liked it when professors assigned us stories that they love. In general, I liked workshops more when they were more than just a workshop, when the professor took the time to actually guide us as young writers and teach us things it took them a long time to figure out on their own. I could probably write ten pages on this question.
Basically ... out of all the ridiculous religion stories which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous—the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah ... there's this big giant universe and it's expanding, it's all gonna collapse on itself and we're all just here just 'cause ... just 'cause'. That, to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.