Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing - no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart o...
My favorite movies are the ones that are different the second time, or where you're constantly discovering new things. It's not just genre movies, either, and it's not just about twists. I saw 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' four times in the theater bef...
Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, withou...
I made 'Prozac Nation' necessary reading because I write necessarily. I tell my story because it is about everyone else: in 1993, people took pills to relieve the pain just like they do now, but it scared them; it doesn't any more, because talk is no...
[T]hat they may believe you, you must say it as obscurely as possible, just like that, simply in hints. You must only give them a peep of the truth, just enough to tantalize them. They'll tell a story better than ours, and of course they'll believe t...
And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an un...
I decided to take my foot off the pedal with all the detail. I'm sure after 'Animalia' and 'The Eleventh Hour,' readers thought that's what to expect from Graeme Base. With 'The Sign of the Seahorse,' I took a step away from the puzzle-book genre - t...
A friend of mine told a story about a date with a guy she was really excited about: He stood her up. He then called her, begging her forgiveness and giving some excuse. She told him to get lost, telling him that he only gets one shot with her, and he...
Write down what your reader needs, no more, no less. Reading should be textured, but not obscure. Henry James could make an entire paragraph out of a single sentence. The reader is completely sensory deprived of the story until the words show the way...
The spark for 'In Praise of Slowness' came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom th...
I read all of the stories that people write about me. The ones that are really interesting are the ones where they actually write their take on me as opposed to just printing what I said, because they're asking similar questions so often, sometimes i...
The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects. Over time, we fail and come ...
We probably read Shakespeare in the first place for his stories, afterwards for his characters. . . . To become intimate with Shakespeare in this way is a great enrichment of mind and instruction of conscience. Then, by degrees, as we go on reading t...
The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the f...
CG can do anything, but it can't do everything well. What it naturally can do is special effects. But using stop-motion comes from our desire to do handmade stuff. There are always going to be kids who get out whatever it might be - clay, bits of wir...
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, o...
Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's m...
If I want to tuck my son into bed and read him a story, but that means I have to take a red-eye to get to a concert - which I would never think of doing otherwise - that's just the way it is. Even if I can't hit the note that night, I got to tuck my ...
I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do...
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house...
I don't study films particularly. I plan to direct, but I'm not watching film - I watch the entire film to see how the story goes, but I don't say, 'Oh, so he does a slow pan here, or he pulls here, watch the crane shot, or look at the composition,' ...
