If you can see yourself as an artist, and you can see that your life is your own creation, then why not create the most beautiful story for yourself?
I feel like I have so many stories basting in my mind, and they come busting out when they're ready.
Of course, everyone knows my story of being born in Russia and moving to the United States at 7. For a few years people would say, 'Well, she's living in the United States, but she's Russian.'
If it's a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.
It'd be impossible to capture the feel of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' in a novel starring Mace Windu; 'All Quiet' is a tragic coming-of-age story.
I've always loved going to see Broadway shows. I've seen 'em all: Rent, Chorus Line, Cats, West Side Story, Guys & Dolls, Wicked, you name it!
An author's dream does not necessarily come instantly. Rather, it is cultivated and nurtured, every epiphany and idea are like rain drops that bring life to the story being written.
Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.
I don't think teams play this game to hurt other guys. I don't think that's the story. We don't play this game to hurt one another.
The problem became this: We became a caricature of ourselves. We were after light, and it began to look as though we were after heat, not to reveal some information or not to find out the story.
My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.
The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.
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.
So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.
The trick is the paradox - turning your story inside out. Now if it is something that appears to be of total normality and then suddenly turns inside out and is a different thing all together then that's fun to write.
You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
