My parents took me around the world when I was young, so I caught the bug. Every person is different when he travels, and every travellers' story is uniquely his own.
I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.
I always wanted to create this community that would come and tell their own story, shoot it - and watch them. The idea is to not have one entity who creates the work, the project, and another entity who consumes it; the idea is people create their own work, like somebody cultivating his garden.
If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending.
I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.
I've never read 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' although I certainly know what that is. And what I love about that concept is as much as it's a zombie story, it's also 'Pride and Prejudice.'
A pulp story without a detective and, obviously, somebody for him to do battle with is unthinkable, and I can't remember reading a pulp story that didn't have a dame - either a good girl or a bad girl.
In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
I am always looking for stories that have not been told too much, and one story that I think is really gripping and important is what police officers go through.
My sister is a good story of resiliency. She had a full ride at UC Davis, but she left school to go to the Philippines - and then she decided to go back to school in her 40s, which surprised me. She went to UC Berkeley, and I think she was one of two African Americans in her class at Haas. She's really impressive.
I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.
I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
I go to movies with my children and see fat kids burping, parents portrayed as total morons, and kids being mean and materialistic, and I feel it's really slim pickin's out there. There's a little dribble of a moral tacked on, but the story is not about that.
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
I was told having a website would help me. I have yet to figure out why my life story needs to be on the web.
Biblical movies need not sermonize, just be honest to the foundational story. As powerful as the message is for people of faith, it's really great storytelling.
I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author's own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of 'Dracula' is appetite.
Here's my definition of a great beach read - a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it's over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die.
Jack Benny was, without a doubt, the bravest comedian I have ever seen work. He wasn't afraid of silence. He would take as long as it took to tell the story.
As an actor, I'm my own worst critic, but after awhile, really, when you watch 'Moonrise Kingdom', it's such a fantastic film that you sort of get sucked into the story, and then you kind of forget about everything else.
I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
I get bored with the same old film coming out every weekend. It feels like it's the same story all the time, and the same visuals, and the characters' dilemmas are remarkably similar.
Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.
Actors, we like stories, we like storytelling, we love being a part of the story, and if you give us a story that's interesting then we'll want to do it.
In 1979, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league. I remember that. Soon after this, the story began to be repeated ad nauseam: the NBA, a tottering mess in the seventies, was saved in the eighties by these two.
The apple which tempts my characters is the one that will remove the knowledge of good and evil. I suppose it's something of a reversal of the conventional Eden story: Freedom of thought is perhaps the greatest good, and needs to be fought for and sacrificed for.
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
It doesn't matter if I go on CBS, PBS or Fox. Whoever is interviewing me is going to want to create some conflict in the story, or it's not interesting. That's just the way the news is.
I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.
I never made a daring rescue, which is the story people want to hear. I did go to my share of fires.
Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.
The American story is a story of immigration. I would be the last person who would say immigrants are not important to America.
'The Hunger Games' for me is I love the books so much and the character and the story were incredible. That's kind of the game plan is just do really interesting stories with interesting characters.
The basic story for the opener is that word came through the bar that someone got knifed and killed up on the Moon Walk. It turns out to be one of the quarter regulars that everybody knows, including Maestro and Bone.
