My story reflexes come less from fantasy or horror than from the darker sort of psychological thriller - not as plot-driven as most, rather more mood-driven. My interest in the supernatural is a complication - though I am less interested in ghosts th...
I think in television and film, it's not usually the child's point of view. It's the story of an adult. If there's a child in a drama or an action-adventure movie, they're someone who needs to be saved, someone who needs to be protected, or if they'r...
The Legend of the Firefish,first in the Trophy Chase Trilogy by George Bryan Polivka, is a winner....filled with action,adventure, danger, intrigue,surprise,suspense....The characters Polivka created are fresh and interesting....A must read for fanta...
More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens....
So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And the...
So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a ...
I am not sure how much Dudley will feature just because of the grand scale of the film and the fact that there are so many stories and characters to tie up. I haven't seen the film yet but I think it will be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but it ...
I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you'...
The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the nex...
Sure I do a lot of jokes about Anne Frank. But when you do those jokes, it makes people remember what happened to her. That process of bringing her story back doesn't have to be a serious one. What I say is all nonsense, but it helps to keep her memo...
You should do what you enjoy doing, what brings you passion. As kids, we spontaneously sing and dance and tell stories, and along the way, someone comes and says, 'No. You shouldn't be doing that.' And we slowly begin to unlearn our passions. I think...
A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consi...
I have 18 tattoos. My tattoos have kind of become their own person. Everybody does stories on them. It is risky to be successful in the fashion industry and to tat your body up, but I figured, the way that I made my career and the way that I am succe...
I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. ...
Your father tells you a story when you're a kid, or your mother or your uncle or whoever it is. You sit there with your mouth open, and your mind goes to all these places they're telling you about that you've never seen, and you're agape. You just ca...
I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.
Curiously enough, I was one of the first to have some say in Hollywood. By sheer accident, I had four successes in a row in the early 30's and, although I was still in my 20's, I demanded and received approval of cast, story and director. I don't kno...
Sendak's 1963 classic 'Where The Wild Things Are' has long been a favorite of mine because of the creative imagery, fantastic adventures and, most of all, because of how this timeless story shows us that children need to be free to roam, explore and ...
My son died from cancer. My granddaughter died from cancer. I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. And the stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right, they distract people from things that are ha...
The scripture is filled with examples of genuine masculinity; you could mine David's story for probably a year by itself. And we have to get the masculinity of Jesus back. Not the pale-faced altar boy, but the man that made a weapon and cleared the t...
Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start w...
