Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It’s one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.
I’ve always been drawn to the extremes of human behavior, and crime fiction is a great way to explore the lives and stories of fascinating people.
I’m not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.
My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the First World War.
We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.
I would never write stories with only despair and defeat and the dark side of life.
Why can’t black women on stage tell stories that can affect white men in the audience?
I would always change my Barbies. I’d cut their hair, paint on tattoos, and create new clothes for them. I would invent elaborate stories: fights, dramas, successes. I would try out my ideas on them. And sometimes they would sing!
I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I’m always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.
I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.
The telling of stories creates the real world.
I’m quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.
I’ll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it’s disappointing.
I don’t recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.
People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn’t.
When I was a kid, my father would read Neil Simon plays with me, when I was going to bed, as bedtime stories.
Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g ‘witch doctor’) to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).
When there’s so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you’ve already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?
The way I define ‘intelligent design’ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.
There’s no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
If you scroll through all the movies I’ve worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies, and so on. So in other words, I’m no specialist, because I’ve done everything. I’m a specialist in music.
Bad choices make good stories.
It’s true that I’m drawn to unusual stories. Normal roles don’t really attract me.
I see dog stories as an antidote to the dire news that nothing is ever going to get better.
We all have stories for a reason, and if we keep them to ourselves, I don’t feel they would help anybody.
I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.
People across the world are yearning to be connected to stories of hope.
Tarot is just stories on cards.
Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.
A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.
I think we’re doing the right things for the right reasons. We’re not doing it to sell products. We’re not doing it to be popular. We’re doing it because in our judgment these stories are important to do, and at this length and this much depth.
I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.
I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.
I love stories about people that, whatever situation they’re in, you can relate to them in a way.
Read a lot – poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.
I love romance stories; I’ve been working on ‘School Spirit’ over at Rosy Press, which is sort of a modern take on a classic romance comic – so I’m clearly a fan!
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
When you get to live your dream, with singing and dancing and acting and playing these wonderful stories, you really have already won, and you always have to remember that.
Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.
Nothing connects with people like humanity. That doesn’t mean you have to tell slice-of-life stories all the time. But you know, with so many options in technology, the consumer’s not really that interested in advertising… They are interested in great stories. That transcends any medium.
The Term Paper Artist’ represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.
Being an entrepreneur is a mindset. You have to see things as opportunities all the time. I like to do interviews. I like to push people on certain topics. I like to dig into the stories where there’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer.
Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.
No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
It’s time to listen to the stories of the Indigenous; we are blessed as a country to look to the wisdom of a really old country.
I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.
I think the personal stories that I tell in my life, I think, sort of do add up to say that you can fail and fail and fail again and continue to move forward.
Symbolism is alright in ‘fiction,’ but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Most of the time it’s the role. Sometimes it’s the story and sometimes it just the paycheck. It’s the little movies that come out as stories or the fact that I have work to go out, you know what I’m saying, you can only be out so long without work, you start getting antsy.
I don’t think there’s any story worth dying for, but I do think there are stories worth taking risks for.
I think it’s great when stories are dark and strange and weirdly personal.
The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.
Stories change people while statistics give them something to argue about.
As a cinematographer, I was always attracted to stories that have the potential to be told with as few words as possible.
When we teach in pluralistic ways, there are two wonderful dividends. First of all, we reach more students, because some learn best through stories, some through works of art, some through role play etc. Second of all, we show what it is like really to understand something.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
People want real-life stories.
There are certain battles that you pick. When they’re not worth picking, they’re laughable stories.
I don’t know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me… anecdotes. But never a joke.
