'Talks on the Gita' is the story of my life, and it is also my message.
Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.
When I read the script for '90210,' I thought, 'Boy, this is very superficial,' and it was. I mean, the pilot was all about the glitz and the glamour of Beverly Hills, the obnoxious kids, and the fish-out-of-water story of Brenda and Brandon Walsh. I couldn't discern from that first script that the show would become very issue-oriented.
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
The earliest maps were 'story' maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.
I'd love to find a really good Brazilian project, an up and coming director or something. I wouldn't want to do the typical favela story, Brazilian cinema has a lot more to offer than just that.
In a lot of cases, as in Tom and Nicole's case, the tabloids were about to break the story, so they said just let the news out. And they called organizations such as ours.
You don't put your head above the parapet and become a personality if you're an illustrator - it's not part of it; it's not possible. You are a servant to the story.
It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
My dream role is to play in a story of how the Joker became the Joker, and I would play the young Heath Ledger.
Some things work better as a book, some things work better as a story, some things works better as a film.
I didn't plan to write YA - I had a story that simply wasn't working as a straight-up fantasy novel.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.
My dear husband, Richard, has been the driving force behind my success and rise to whatever level I am now. My story and legacy is incomplete without his mention.
I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.
'Monkeys' is made up of nine short stories that tell an overall story. 'Folly' is a series of vignettes all put together to tell a larger story. In 'Lust and Other Stories,' there are nine stories - three, three, three; the beginnings of love, the middles, and the afters.
Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.
'Star Wars' is mythology. It's like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It's the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless.
You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.
There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.
In terms of 'American Horror Story' and 'Nashville,' what attracted me to those, and 'Friday Night Lights,' for that matter, is that they felt like something innovative and something that we hadn't seen before. As an actor, that's exciting.
I think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place. I never want to be part of something like that, where there's an agenda there that's not about telling a story, where its someone getting on a soapbox and preaching their own beliefs onto somebody.
If China were to explode, I'd want to be there in a flash. If there's a big story, I want to be there.
An experienced slush-pile reader doesn't need more than a few seconds to see if a story has potential. You don't need to eat all of a rotten egg to determine that it's rotten.
I'll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it's very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn't like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.
To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.
With 24-hour news... the story moves on with the media.
Yes, there is a story about Agent Orange, and we knew that it harmed our troops and we knew how long it was to get the medical community to accept that, the military to accept it, the VA to accept it.
Paolo Maldini never won, but he was the best defender in the world. Gianluigi Buffon never won; he was the best goalkeeper in the world for many years. But this is the story of the Ballon d'Or.
I'd like to do the young cadet thing again for sure, but that's why I wanted to do this, to see if I could do it. I took the scenes out of the script and put them together and read them as one little arc, story and that seemed to work.
Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.
That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.
A single prop that does not look real to an audience can louse you up. The same is true of the smallest flaw in setting up the motivation in a story line.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
