I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.
Because I found myself telling the story of his family to people without the visual aids that I was able to employ by filming them eventually. But I very much knew exactly what I was going to do.
The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.
And then, when I thought about joining the Air Force, flying seemed like a natural extension of the motorcycling experience. You're going faster, higher. You're operating a machine that's a lot more powerful than you are.
I love working with older actors because number one, I can learn so much from them because they have so much experience. And it's fun to hear their stories from their era, some of the jokes.
I have an affection for tangible objects, like books and pages, but people sure do seem to love their Kindles! We're definitely in the middle of a revolution that will determine how people find, read, and experience stories.
My mother always read to me as a child. I really believe that bonding time between a parent and child is so important and precious. I have lasting memories of those stories because the experience was special.
With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.
I just think there are certain men who feel like engaging in a story told from a female point of view is somehow a feminizing experience. And that itself is something that they're almost supposed to not want to engage.
I don't want to go slumming in somebody else's pain just to write a book. I want to go into those darker places to shine a light on that experience and come out with a story that validates the human spirit.
No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.
It's hard to conceive of someone who could work for at least a few hours each day for months and years on the same story without it being close enough to their life experience to fuel their commitment.
The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.
Having had that experience... I think, what modern culture wants to see is the relationship with the woman. I don't think you can tell a story on film nowadays where the woman simply is there for the man when he decides to settle down.
Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants.
It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
Like prospecting in the 19th century, reconnaissance of the asteroids would of necessity take place in an arena where trouble is likely and help is distant. Heroic stories of individual triumph and failure, set on landscapes never seen by humankind, ...
The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
