For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.
If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.
Ratings have changed, viewer habits have changed and the options for the audience have grown enormously, but I don't think how you tell a story is fundamentally different.
I'm sure fame is yet to come; however, it's not my ultimate goal. I really just want to be able to tell stories, and create, and do it for a living.
Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience.
A book reaches a different crowd of people. There are 50 different stories of very different individuals participating in their communities either locally or nationally in meaningful ways.
There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can't achieve it.
I like stories with a collision of disparate tones. Look at 'Shameless' or 'House of Lies'. They go from big, silly, and comedic to very real dramatic moments in the wink of an eye.
I now find magic in the mundane. I'm also more creative - better able to look beyond the obvious and come up with new story angles.
I think until Britain acknowledges just how much of a presence black people had here before the Sixties, then there are certain stories that are not going to be inclusive of what I have to offer.
The story of gluten as it relates to the brain throws a wide net, so much more encompassing than the inflammation of a small section of the small intestine that characterizes celiac disease.
'Planet Earth' was such an extraordinary series and the 'Making Of'... is fascinating: the creatures and stories behind the camera are just as fascinating as those in front. It's a bit of a dream come true to be a part of the team in some small way.
I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
The difference between graphic novels and web comics is even greater than graphic novels and story boarding. Web comics really is a legitimately separate genre.
I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!
I'm a big supporter of Joe Johnston and I think that 'Captain America' is going to be really fun and I gather that the story is really interesting. It just wasn't what I wanted to do next, to be honest.
I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.
I'd say I'm the opposite of someone that has the urge to stand in front of strangers and make them laugh, but the idea of getting up and telling a story and people finding it amusing always appealed to me.
