In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.
I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word.
My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do.
I have about 1,000 hours of myself on tape in a vault in Los Angeles. But I also have a photographic memory about my jokes, because they're really about me; they're my stories.
I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
There is a story which is not being told strongly enough of the Afghan employees of the UN inside the country who are saving hundreds of thousands of lives everyday by their bravery and nobody talks of them.
Young actors often ask me how do you get an agent, how do you get started, how do you get to audition, and I don't know what to tell them because my story is so fluky.
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 pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
I think I've played a lesbian about five times. The first one was with Helen Baxendale in a drama called 'The Investigator,' about the conditions lesbians had to live under in the army in Britain, which was based on a true story.
Personal style isn't simply an exercise in parroting but rather an exhibition for our own stories - from the gait of our walk to the rhythm of our speech to the manner in which the necktie falls from the knot.
I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.
The story line was done in a way that's organic and was doled out very slowly in little bites. We think that's authentic for this character, that her feelings are very deeply buried or she never felt them.
I loved the Little Lulu stories, where she would fantasize that her bedroom rug would turn into a pool of water, and she could dive down into the center of the world.
We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.
Sometimes opinions should kept to ones self, but not in appropriate situations. Be the judge of the appropriate situation, and be prepared for backfire. Moral of the story; if everyone doesn't agree, then prepare for them to lash out in disagreement.
I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.
I loved putting on stories as plays when I was just six. I was the director, the actress and the set designer; I cast my girlfriends in parts, and I suggested to the local kindergarten teachers that we do free performances for the children.
Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?
The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.
