Audiences are very willing to be taken somewhere, and to ask an audience beforehand what it wants is probably, I think, a mistake. Much better you should tell them what you want and hope they agree with it.
I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.
Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'
When someone tells me, 'Oh, we have so many problems on Earth; space exploration costs too much money,' I say, 'I absolutely agree with you. But I still hope we do it.'
I hope before I am getting too old and when my mind is still functioning, I can tell some better stories.
Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.
Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert. Those are the guys I look at who are telling me pretty much the truth. And they throw humor into it which makes it much more interesting to listen to.
Candidates should be extremely cautious in displaying a sense of humor. If he or she tells a joke with a point, there is almost certain to be some minority group offended.
A lot of my humor centers on the act of telling jokes and I think this can prevent certain audiences from suspending their feeling of disbelief. It might piss a few people off, but I can't help it.
Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.
I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.
But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You're looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues.
Some might think that George W. Bush had his shortcomings, but let me tell you something - history's going to be kind to George W. Bush.
The book 'A Reliable Wife' is a slice of American history. It takes a part of American history and tells a story about the purchase of a wife by a Wisconsin businessman. The research of that would have been really interesting.
When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.
Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years.
Let this be our time in history so that someday we can tell our children and grandchildren that we were there, that we changed the course of history for the better.
When I was a boy, I was a worrier, and so was my son, Joe. I used to tell him that worrying meant he had an imagination and that one day he'd be pleased.
It's one of those things where people tell you that when you have kids it will change your perspective on life, and you're like, 'Yea, yea,' but then you really understand it when it happens to you.
They went back there, looked at all the computers, asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I had been running.
You can't show me an ad on TV with hard bodies and say I have to buy that car. You have to tell me why that car is better and safer than another car.
