When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
This might disappoint you somewhat, but I have to say my interest in Tolkien has faded dramatically over the years. His language skills are amazing, his story good and fascinating, but… he has a very Judeo-Christian perspective, and his use of mythical creatures is very… ignorant.
My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go – just go, go, go.
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It’s easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story.
I don’t start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It’s not as if I start with Madhuri Dixit and then think what kind of film.
Because God gave you your makeup and superintended every moment of your past, including all the hardship, pain, and struggles, He wants to use your words in a unique manner. No one else can speak through your vocal cords, and, equally important, no one else has your story.
There are some ghost stories in Japan where – when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet – a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It’s a very scary story.
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
My life has been a dream. If someone had to write a story about it, it would seem a little unreal. It’s the kind of story I would read and say, ‘Nah, that’s not possible.’
He’s this amazing ambassador for all superheroes. What we’ve made as a film not only examines that but is also an amazing adventure story. It’s been an honor to work on. As a comic book fan, Superman is like the Rosetta Stone of all superheroes.
I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it’s different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
I go to movies with my children and see fat kids burping, parents portrayed as total morons, and kids being mean and materialistic, and I feel it’s really slim pickin’s out there. There’s a little dribble of a moral tacked on, but the story is not about that.
I would like people to recognize in looking at my story that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It’s not the environment, it’s not the other people who were there trying to help you or trying to stop you. It’s what you decide to do and how much effort you put behind it.
When you come back on top after you’ve fallen, it’s a better story.
For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.
The prosecution has to go with the evidence and the facts and tell the story as it happened. The defense has more creative freedom. All you have to do is look for a defense that works. But it doesn’t have to be the truth. Sometimes you get lucky and it is, but sometimes you don’t, and either way, it doesn’t matter.
There were many African Americans – many, many stories similar to my story.
The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.
In, like, seventh or eighth grade every day after school, my friend Andrew and I would watch ‘Wayne’s World.’ And I think it’s a great example of a sketch effectively turned into a movie and a story that really works with a good journey. Not easily accomplished, but such a good journey.
I like stories in specific time periods. ‘The Revenant’s’ era of American history was fascinating because it was this lawless no-man’s land. It defined the idea of the American frontiersman as man conquering nature. In a way, the story of Hugh Glass is about man dominating nature.
Every place has a story – or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.
Everyone’s the hero in their own story. You’ve lived your life. You’re the good guy of your life, the protagonist of your own movie. Everyone knows that they have more in them to offer than they sometimes show.
When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story.
Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story’s characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That’s why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.
I firmly believe that a story is only as good as the villain.
Choosing the narrator for a first-person story like ‘Downriver’ is a crucial decision because the voice has to be one the reader wants to listen to, and the voice has to be a match for the emotion you want the story to carry.
When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren’t actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.
Changes are required as far as scripts are concerned. People need to open up and experiment in story lines. But we don’t have good script writers, producers or directors. The Punjabi industry lacks cinema knowledge and professionalism. It is the saddest part.
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
When I did A Soldier’s Story, I was very young and green and thought I knew everything-now I know I know everything!
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
It’s nice to know when you’re a part of a story, it’s nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.
Life begins at 40 – but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
I’m writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?
The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.
What we did ten years ago with the Playstation was a phenomenal success story for the company. That product had a ten year life cycle, which has never been done in this industry.
If you’re going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it’s sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.
Be unpredictable, be real, be interesting. Tell a good story.
A dark, fantastic adventure set in an alternate 1900s Asia, ‘Monstress’ is buried deep in the supernatural. It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for a long time – it just took me awhile to put all the pieces together.
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun.
All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.
I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.
I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‘Maria’ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.
The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you’re telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.
