The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.
Stories of Fantasy are nothing more than the retelling of our own triumphs and sad, sad tragedies ... Tod Langley I have that painted on my office wall and love to stare at it.
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.
My uncle who helped in a big part of raising me from when I was young, had moved from California, and would just tell me these legendary stories of these motorcycle clubs that he was around and that he used to ride with.
At MTV, although the audience is smaller, I found it more interesting to deliver news to a specific group of people, because my story then did not have to try to be all things to all people.
Online, you have things like Slate Magazine, which has a lot of commentary and analysis of stories, so it gives you a fuller picture. I would compare that to a news magazine or the New Republic.
The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.
I'm interested in working with groups of actors to tell complicated stories about what's happening to people, and that's because I came out of the theatre where I worked in ensembles, and I really loved that.
I tend to tell stories that have a lot of momentum; it's not like 'and then months later...' I like things where the momentum of one action rolls into the next one so everything is the sum of that.
As we saw in the Queen's Speech, anti-social behaviour - a phenomenon that I believe to be a genuine worry that is also being fed by a lot of scare stories - is the political theme of the moment.
So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.
What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.
You hear all these stories about, 'There's one in a million guys that make it to the NBA and stay there.' To see people cheering for me and when they say my name, it's just crazy. It's still crazy to me.
As an actor, I'm my own worst critic, but after awhile, really, when you watch 'Moonrise Kingdom', it's such a fantastic film that you sort of get sucked into the story, and then you kind of forget about everything else.
I know as a consumer I want a story. I want a defining - I don't want just an album full of singles. I want to get to know the artist beyond what everyone else can hear on the radio.
I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.
I love clean sheets. It's the simultaneous reminiscence of how they got dirtied to begin with, and hopeful anticipation of what stories they will live to tell next time you are standing fatefully in front of the washing machine.
In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.
I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word.
My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do.
