People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.
For me becoming a filmmaker was about taking back my voice - crafting stories that would move away from the problematic narratives that the studio system would put out about Latinos. I think this is why people like my films. They're refreshing. They feel more real.
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.
There's nothing more important than a good story.
One day we wake up and we are broken. We taste it in our morning kiss. Our mirror tells us the same stories in separate hours: things will never be the same.
What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.
I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.
She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.
The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.
A story comes into your head fully formed, you know exactly the place, the setting, the people. All you've got to do is get it our and written as soon as you possibly can.
In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.
I do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.
I came to graduate school with a certain vocabulary about how to talk about other people's stories, but I couldn't understand how to look at my own stories in that way. And that was what made editing such a challenge for me.
If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.
I am a storyteller, and I grew up with a father who told big-fish stories, so storytelling is very much a part of me. It was a part of my family.
People love stories and the more you can give information and knowledge and even wisdom through a story, the more likely you are to be heard.
We cannot bear for our most mysterious experiences to remain unexplained. I've therefore learned. . . that every story has worth, since a person takes the time to tell it. The key is to listen.
I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
The most questionable thing I did was make Superman a government agent. If this had been a Superman story, I'd never have done that - and I know that, because I have a Superman story I want to tell someday. In this story, Batman was the hero, so the world was built around him.
I always look for good stories and good characters, and if they're placed in a whodunit, then I'm interested.
