All the Midkemia stories are part of a 'history of an imaginary place,' so I've always known the cycle covered five rift wars. I just got to the end after 30 books. So there was no particular inspiration, save it was time to finish the whole shebang.
It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story.
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to f...
I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.
When I think of Camelot, I think of the castle in France where we film, but I think it's wrong to lock it down to one place because it's all part of our imagination. They are legends for a reason. Their stories have endured for hundreds of years and,...
Christmas was always a big holiday in our family. Every Christmas Eve before we'd go to bed, my mom and dad would read to us two or three stories and they would always be 'The Happy Prince,' 'The Gift of the Magi' and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas...
My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that trage...
Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.
I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.
Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that's the story that we're not seeing, and it's unfortunate that we glori...
Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences - the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe t...
I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.'
I think violence, cynicism, brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling, going back to people sitting around fires, the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of ...
I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.
Mary Tyler Moore was a working woman whose story lines were not always about dating and men. They were about work friendships and relationships, which is what I feel my adult life has mostly been about.
Thus we hope to teach mythology not as a study, but as a relaxation from study; to give our work the charm of a story-book, yet by means of it to impart a knowledge of an important branch of education.
My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotti...
Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybod...
Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or conve...
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real...
