I've always wondered what it would be like if the Messiah, or Christ Returned, were actually alive and living in our society; who would that person be, how we would identify them, how would they live and what would they believe in, how would society react to them? I decided to try and tell my idea of that story.
The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world.
Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.
I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.
When you are making a movie, there are a zillion cooks in the kitchen, and you don't always get what you want to do. The story can always go in a different direction than what you would like. You compromise, and there is dealing and bickering.
I have found, writing a blog, that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.
'E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.
Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In the nonprofit world, the right picture is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I use PhotoPad to sync our Samasource Flickr account to my iPad and slip it out of my purse at cocktail parties to tell our story.
With 'If I Stay,' I want you to feel that the whole story is being told from a larger, spiritual point of view. So the beginning is very theatrical.
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.
Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. He might well stand beside me as a global warming denier.
The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.
My story sort of sounds ridiculous because the first movie I produced was 'E.T.'
You open a section of 'The New York Times,' and there's a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there's an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.
When I finished 'Cocktail,' it took me a very long time to get out of Veronica's mindspace, behaviour, and zone. I had to reconnect with who I am. It is a similar story with 'Bajirao Mastani.' Some films demand that.
I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.'
I grew up in Doncaster and have felt the love for football run through the town; it's for that reason that I have a real personal passion to make Doncaster Rovers a success story.
Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that's where we're heading.
It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.
Animation is very singular. Like, even the 'Toy Story' movies. People will go, 'Oh, gosh, you're so lucky, getting to play opposite Tom Hanks!' And it's, like, 'It may have appeared to be that, but we were never in the room together.'
I know how to tell a story to a thousand people. Sometimes I don't know how to tell a story to a piece of tape on a wall and a camera.
I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.
I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel.
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
At every turn, Molly Antopol's gorgeous debut story collection, 'The UnAmericans,' is firing on multiple cylinders.
Everybody's got one killer story. It doesn't take talent to tell that story, it just takes experience.
Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.
Most people are dispensable in 'Game of Thrones,' not only in the story but in the series.
So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I'd better tell my story before other people told it for me.
Chip maker Nvidia is the new old thing, an overnight success story years in the making that is having its moment and then some.
I think film, to me, as a director, is about telling a story.
As an actor, whatever I get the opportunity to do, if it has a good story then I'm in. I thought 'Dead End' had a great story; 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' of course, was probably the first real horror film I was in.
