My story is a freedom song from within my soul. It is a guide to discovery, a vision of how even the worst pain and heartaches can be channeled into human monuments, impenetrable and everlasting.
There is no greater agony than carrying the burden of an untold story.
I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I’m attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn’t quite what I’m seeing – taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I’ve never seen before.
To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible – that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.
Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. He might well stand beside me as a global warming denier.
‘Extraordinary’ is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
For me, the film-maker is more important than the story.
I got freed of all of my addictions January 16, 2009, but at that point I didn’t do a full surrender to Jesus. I didn’t give a full surrender until February 18, 2017, so there’s quite a story in between where God was still chasing me.
You have to go to what the essence of what Pennywise is about – the dark power of adulthood. It’s not coincidence all the grown-ups in town are evil. This is not a story about a monster. It’s a story about the end of childhood.
I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn’t make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.
To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.
This is an absolute turning point in the story of our country because I think if we go on with being enmeshed in the E.U., it will continue to erode our democracy. That is something that worries me.
Reality, by itself, becomes a story by Philip K. Dick.
I really don’t look up to anybody that is doing that great in life, because I don’t know their story.
I had an advantage over a lot of people who had gone to school and earned degrees in writing and had learned the rules for writing, so to speak. My style was just to tell a story but to tell it well, and that has worked out for me so far.
The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else’s story.
I had two little daughters – I think they were 7 and 4 at the time – and I said, ‘I’ll write you a story. What do you want it to be about?’ One of them said ‘a princess’ and the other one said ‘a bride.’ I said, ‘That’ll be the title.’
As long as there’s breath in our lungs our story is still being written.
There are people who are hating you more because of where you are coming from. People like the ‘he comes from nothing and made it to F1’ story. I know that, but I just do my thing; I focus on my job.
In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.
Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.
We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.
If anyone reads about my story, and says, ‘Look, there’s a guy that struggled with a lot of stuff that I am dealing with now, and he got through it,’ then, yeah, I’d love that. If it helps one person, then that’s great.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
I do really long DJ sets – I play for five or six hours sometimes – but the live shows are a bit more compact. The arch of how to tell a story, where the energy is, where you have peaks and drops, where things go up and things come down, that’s all being informed by DJ-ing.
If you can’t sit in a cafe quietly and be ignored, how can you observe human nature and write a story?
People still love a good story, and I don’t think that will change.
Any story about revenge is ultimately a story about forgiveness, redemption, or the futility of revenge.
Hopefully, the guys will work on a ‘Conchords’ film because the world deserves it. That’s up to them, because we’re all keen to do it. It’s about finding the time and the right story. All I can do is encourage them and then wait for the phone call.
I’m not as good a singer as I am an actor. So that’s why I – the stories I like so much is because I’ve been a story teller for a long time. I started as a singer and found out I didn’t have a very good voice. That’s the reason I went into acting.
There was a story that I was in a shoe shop and that I threw a pair of flip flops at the wall, shouting, ‘I can’t believe how overpriced these are!’ I thought, ‘Gosh, if I’m gonna take a big stand on something I would hope it would be for more than flip flops!’
The Wonder Woman that you see in ‘Batman v Superman’ is a woman who has been around, and she’s very experienced. She understands a lot about man. Whereas, in the standalone movie, we are telling the grown-up story, Diana becoming Wonder Woman, and this was a story that was never told before.
I can respect different opinions, because everybody has a story.
When I was a young kid, my father was a big fan of Hollywood movies. He would make me watch movies with him, and he would explain the story and characters to me.
People ask me where I’m from. I say Ireland, and they are like ‘Really? You don’t look Irish.’ Then you have to explain… people are intrigued, but sometimes you think, ‘Why do I have to tell my whole story every time I open my mouth?
Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory,’ which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
It’s a wonderful story for the gun lobby to tell that if you just load up schools with weapons, you’ll be safer. All of the evidence suggests that homes and communities that have more weapons have more gun crimes, not less.
Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.
I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what’s going on.
Sometimes I realize halfway through a story, I’m like, ‘Why would anyone care about this? It’s uninteresting.’
I’ll try anything, but the pig testicles in Taiwan were a little much. Eh, it wasn’t half bad. There was this one dish I had there, the translation is, ‘The Monk Jumps over the Fence.’ It’s a fish dish with all these spices. It was beautiful, man – it was poetry. It had a whole story.
Everything was happening on that strip of Fulton Street. And if I wanted Chinese food, if I wanted to play video games, if I wanted pizza, if I had to go to the corner story for a juice, I had to go on Fulton Street.
When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.
Every designer needs a story. Mine is all about glamour because my family has been in the business of glamour for three generations. My grandfather Shamshuddin Khan started his embroidery and fabric-making business in the 1930s.
With a bucket of Lego, you can tell any story. You can build an airplane or a dragon or a pirate ship – it’s whatever you can imagine.
I’ve always believed that clothing is a great way to tell your story.
Many a good newspaper story has been ruined by over verification.
There’s no success story. Everybody’s got a ghetto story. You always want to make it bigger than what it is.
When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don’t try to write a parable or make a point.
I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.
An important part of my story is that I didn’t walk out of Planned Parenthood immediately after witnessing the ultrasound-guided abortion. It is made to appear that way in the film, ‘Unplanned,’ because they are trying to fit 10 years of my life into an hour-and-a-half-long movie.
‘The Lobster,’ at some point, was my most accessible film. Then I made ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer,’ which turned out to be not as accessible as ‘The Lobster.’ It was the film I wanted to make and the story I wanted to tell.
