I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.
A good trap is like a good story: hidden and leading toward one inevitable conclusion
Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.
The journey as a writer is not so much about our stories, but the stories of others we meet along the way on our wonderful path. #grateful
social media isn’t about “marketing” your church or message; it’s about “connecting” with people who want to make your story part of their story.
The American story is a story of immigration. I would be the last person who would say immigrants are not important to America.
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.
Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.
My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.
Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.
Children and teenagers don't easily relate to stories about kings and dukes, and to tell only stories about kings and dukes is to ignore the regular people.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.
Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.
I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell.
