Not an easy story but an important one. Compelling, powerful and engaging.
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
In the end, the truth always wins out. It always does, no matter how many times you tell a story that isn't true. In the end, the truth comes out. There's either video evidence or photographic evidence. I think the American people are smart consumers.
So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life - my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction - they want to tell that most important story, and they don't have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
I hate when you see a film and after one scene you know what's going to happen and you can predict the whole story.
It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.
That's why they (the Bush administration) had to make up that story about weapons of mass destruction. Because that was the only thing that would sell to the American people, and that wasn't true.
Edgar Sawtelle is a boy without a voice, but his world, populated by the dogs his family breeds, is anything but silent. This is a remarkable story about the language of friendship—a language that transcends words.
It's great that the story [Allied] is set in the '40s because the '40s feel to it is completely appropriate.
My first published book, Story of a Girl, was the fourth book I wrote.
I'm so grateful that I had the luxury of transitioning in private. Because when you transition in the public eye, the transition becomes the story.
If you have half a story and you don't know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone.
I like to approach comedy from character, to have the stakes for the individuals in the story be very high.
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
It's no easy matter to paint a background. I venture to say that the old painters had more difficulty with their grounds than with their figures. You know the story of Vandyke brought to Rubens with this recommendation: 'He already knows how to paint a background. ' 'That is more than I can do!' was the reply.
Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first. People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.
So we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.
People have forgotten how to tell a story.
Peter Geye has rendered the Minnesota north shore in all its stark, dangerous beauty, and it is the perfect backdrop for this deeply moving story of conflict and forgiveness. Safe from the Sea is a remarkable debut.