Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the uni...
When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?
'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.
When I think about my great conversations with Marlon Brando on the set of 'Morituri,' I think there's a story there, just as I do with my experience working with James Cameron on 'Titanic.' And then there are all my years on 'Y&R' and all that has h...
I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that...
Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film.
We have a huge tech following that do nothing but Digg tech stories, and then there's another pool of users that remove the tech section from their view of Digg, because you can go on and customize your own experience and remove sections you don't li...
Over the years, with all the experience, I've become more mature about the subjects I pick. I have a better understanding of what works at the box office. Once the story is finalised, I surrender to the director and follow him. After that, my perform...
I've made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They're very universal stories I've told - every movie I've done.
Based on my own experience, when you're going through adolescence you don't know how the world works. You can't set a story in the world you live in because you don't know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck.
I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!' We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences.
It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision.
Like all food, whether you're talking about Persian food, or Chinese food, or Swedish food, it's always a reflection of wars, trading, a bunch of good and a bunch of bad. But what's left is always the food story.
Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.
In 'Snow White and the Hunstman,' when we see them in the Dark Forest, you're allowed a lot of freedom to be able to cutaway to, for instance, the prince. That B and C story stuff helps the writing process, even though it makes it a more complicated ...
You cannot mistake Bush's clarity of purpose. He believes in a story about freedom and opportunity that makes his followers feel like they aren't just ticking their days down but are part of something larger than themselves.
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he h...
Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn't get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes.
I'm not a good storyteller. I always think I'm going to get interrupted, or something's going to get edited. I think that comes from being in a large family, so you have to get your story in really quick or someone cuts you off.
The history of slavery and the complication of slavery is that it is an international concept. It is something that affected people who were our people. For example, there were people from the west of Nigeria who were taken by the hundreds of thousan...
