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.
I want to tell the story. Mostly, when you see rock movies, it has to be this over-the-top thing. I want to give people a Bret Michaels movie where they see that my life is a comedy of errors. I also want to show my fans how to get through the kind of troubles that would leave most people flat on the floor.
The reward is that you can actually create a world separate from reality with a story, actors, music, and camera design. When it works it can entertain, move people and teach us all.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.
Most of the time, when the mainstream media reports on something, it never tells the whole story.
Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor's job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story.
I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
Also there is a twist to the story as I'm being haunted and driven crazy, attacked and so on. All I seem to do is run and scream and cry in every scene.
I didn't mind if they yelled at me, but when they came on the field, it was a different story.
Actually, a myth is a story that is not just not true, but it's a story that is especially true. And I think the myth of Jesus is especially true.
And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap.
For reasons which I can't logically explain, in all of the films I've done, I've ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.
I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
I really only take roles that I love and that I have some kind of innate compulsion or need to tell that story. Although it's almost like I have no control over it. It's like they choose me.
To me this movie is about what is valuable. To one person it might be a stone; to someone else, a story in a magazine; to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.
I can't think of a major story that we have broken that was incorrect. But we have had to correct some things that were false; we have had to retract things.
It's all about creating a back story for the character and developing emotional responses that are true to life in relation to the character. It isn't necessary to live a tragic life to create from that place.
When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.
But to make a long story short, I decided that I was going to run, and I announced that I was going to run for president in Florida, I would be the favorite son from Florida, and that would stop Johnson and Kennedy from dividing up the state.
It's important to find characters that share sympathy with a young audience, not just in the story but their role in the world.
The fact that I was a believer, a Christian, everybody immediately thought this guy's a minister, he's so nice and, oh by the way, he can play a little bit. The other thing for me is being undersized. What a great story, what an overachiever, kind of like Rudy.
Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
I believe God gives people the right to say no, to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to their version of their story.
I'm always a sucker for a love story.
In some ways, that's the story of my season - when I wasn't making big mistakes, I was winning races and being on the podium. And when I made mistakes I was still fourth or fifth, just off the podium.
In 1957, 'West Side Story' had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; 'Bye Bye Birdie,' set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.
Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.
I think if you're artistic in any way, you're probably born with it. I guess it's a talent that can be learned here and there, but I think the instinct to tell a story or to create something happens maybe in the womb.
I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.
I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good story around it.
I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.
I'm always looking for a story.
The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out. That's why I'm always hoping society never collapses because the first ones to go will be entertainers.
