Jack Lipnick: We're only interested in one thing, Bart. Can you tell a story? Can you make us laugh? Can you make us cry? Can you make us want to break out in joyous song? Is that more than one thing? Okay!
I'm all about entertaining and keeping a reader on the edge of their seat, so to me, the social issues have to be meaningful and give the book what's really 'at stake,' but ultimately it's not about them - it's always a personal story of everyday peo...
Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in...
This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by...
I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working,...
Everyone is special; every moment in our life is unique. However difficult or painful a situation may look at present, it soon becomes a memory and a special journey. Memories make us who we are, but it also starts declining with age. There are many ...
I'm not a malicious person. When you get past the tattoos and leather, I give people a fair shake. There are periods when I've sowed some wild oats, no doubt about it. And I can party with some of the heavyweights. There are some stories about me tha...
You know what? I feel my book is kind of pointless. I didn't want to do a book, but rather than tell the same old stories over and over when my wife Angie and I are out at parties, I could just hand out a bunch of books, and she won't have to hear th...
I prefer working, period. I think that I like doing film more just because when you get a script, you have the story from start to finish, so you can really find the character's arc, and when you walk away from it, you know you're sort of powerless t...
I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - th...
Stephen King once wrote, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and ...
I am not an actor. Yes, every so often I appear on talk shows to promote something I've written, and I enjoy doing so because I have a lot of stories to tell, and I like making audiences laugh. But that's not acting. That's just me being me.
I would like people to recognize in looking at my story that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It's not the environment, it's not the other people who were there trying to help you or trying to stop you. It's what you...
Many theologians believe the Gospel writers include miracle stories in order to prove that Jesus is divine. But miracles are not proof of deity. Many Old Testament prophets heal people and even raise them from the dead, yet they are mere mortals. Jes...
Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then com...
An author is a trigger to our own imaginations. We either go along for the ride, or we flinch and look the other way. Don't look the other way. Embrace the story, embrace the characters, embrace everything the author wants you to explore, because the...
Readers are distrustful and, although they accept the rules of the proposed game upon entry, they remain on the lookout for the slightest contradiction and often allow their own prejudices to lead them astray. When they have an openly autobiographica...
A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long thought that these lines of dialogue carve out the lines...
In preparing the present volume, it has been the aim of the author to do full justice to the ample material at his command, and, where possible, to make the illustrations tell the main story to anatomists. The text of such a memoir may soon lose its ...
Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into m...
As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades t...
