The interesting thing about the China story, getting back to the macro and micro, and as dire as I think the macro story is - due to bad credit and credit extension that makes Greece and Spain and the U.S. look like child's play - when you get to the...
I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.
It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don't have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story; it's about what goes on inside your ...
I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got...
My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as...
I can easily come up with ten really iconic stories/trade paperbacks for Superman, Batman, others... name me ten equally big, iconic Wonder Woman stories. Much harder. That ain't the character's fault, that isn't sexism, that's just not servicing the...
Obviously sex and nudity sells, but that's what people go to cable for but that's not going to happen on network daytime television... so I think it really is always going to come down to story. How do you make a story interesting enough so people wi...
I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting ...
I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate...
Steven and I have worked together a lot and I'm far ahead of the curve than most people in knowing what he wants, but he knows far more than I know about what's important for the story. So, most of the changes he will make will involve story changes.
I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty mode...
I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame...
Jim Cunningham: Now, I'm going to tell you a little story today. It's a heartbreakingly sad story about a young man whose life was completely destroyed by these instruments of fear. A young man, searching for love in all the wrong places. His name wa...
Joel Cairo: I certainly wish you would have invented a more reasonable story. I felt distinctly like an idiot repeating it. Sam Spade: Don't worry about the story's goofiness. A sensible one would have had us all in the cooler.
[last lines] Narrator: Within no time, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared from the face of the earth. When they had finished, they felt a virginal glow of happiness. For the first time in their lives, they believed they had done something purel...
[first lines] Michael Sullivan, Jr.: There are many stories about Michael Sullivan. Some say he was a decent man. Some say there was no good in him at all. But I once spent 6 weeks on the road with him, in the winter of 1931. This is our story.
Stinky Pete the Prospector: Idiots! Children destroy toys. You'll be ruined, forgotten, spending eternity rotting on some landfill. Woody: Well, Stinky Pete, I think it's time you learned the true meaning of playtime.
Buzz Lightyear: Don't worry, Woody. In just a few hours you'll be sitting around a campfire with Andy making delicious hot Schmoes. Woody: [lamely] They're called "S'mores", Buzz. Buzz Lightyear: Yes, yes. Of course.
[Channel-surfing at breathtaking speed to find the Al's Toy Barn ad] Rex: Go back, go back, you missed it! Hamm: Too late, I'm in the 40's, gotta go around the horn!
