My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.
Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men-that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.
I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.
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.
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
. . . the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.
My best clients tell stories that inspire. They tell stories about situations that you can identify with.
We are now debating and talking about a story [Russian hacker attack] based on something that isn't true.
There are so many angles to follow up: government incompetence, sophisticated charity scams, how insurance companies treat victims, construction of the levees, who will start ripping off the billions of dollars available in new contracts. Every single one of these stories is going to be a big one.
I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.
We live in this irreparably broken world, and I don't wish to deny reality, but the amazing thing to me is not that we refuse to relinquish hope as a species. The amazing thing is that we're right to hold on to hope. The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy. . . . Obviously not all stories end happily. We don't always have good fortune, but hope gives us, as a species and as individuals, what we otherwise wouldn't have: A chance.
Fantasy and science fiction stories are very applicable to talking to your children about the world. They tend to talk about the big questions regarding life and the universe.
People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
I will do almost anything for the sake of a joke or for the sake of someone's real belief in something to help tell a story.
I always hope that the artwork will complement and enrich a story.