I didn't want to travel. I didn't want to leave my family. I heard all these stories from Dad about not having Edward around when he was young, and I didn't want that to happen.
My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day.
I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad, then once I'd walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I'd disappeared into the wings of his mind's stage, like a character no longer necessary to the ongoing story line.
A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.
You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again.
In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.
I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
The story of Hosea and Gomer is the second most powerful picture of God's love in the Bible. Other than Christ's death, there is no greater picture of love.
I taped the autopsy photos from Marilyn Monroe's death to my lunch box in fifth grade, and I would write stories in which someone inevitably died.
I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that.
My first western was 'Death Hunt' with Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin; that was where I learned to ride. The movie was based on a true story about a guy that eluded the Mounties in Canada. We were in Canada for six weeks riding horses.
I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.
The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war.
I hadn't really thought about this until 'The Lake of Dreams,' but I've set all my stories in places that are familiar to me. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters.
I like entertainment and think mastery is good, though I don't feel like a master. If a theme means having a story that's legible, then that's certainly what we do. But we don't treat design as an add-on layer.
The way I define 'intelligent design' is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.
That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.
I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.
I wanted to win the gold medal and then go home and further my education in college. I had no intentions whatsoever to become a professional fighter because I had heard horror stories about former boxers who made money but, in the end, ended up with ...
I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.
