Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
'Armor On' explains why I needed armor in the first place. Sonically, you'll hear this battle of, 'I love you, no I don't. I love you, I hate you.' That's what you'll feel. You see the story kind of fight against itself.
I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
I think there's definitely a way to tell a story, to also look at marriages that are working, but find drama from what's challenging them. That's what I think, certainly, 'Parenthood' is kind of about: the unexpected things that come up in your life that challenge you as a man, as a woman, as a husband and a wife, and as a parent.
I think 'The Condemned' has a great story. It's a lot more than a mindless action flick.
We work very hard in all of the Pixar films to not make anything in the imagery that causes people to think of something other than the story.
It sounds corny to say, but we're like a family. That experience for all of us really created a bond... The 'West Side Story' experience, it really is a family. There's a closeness that has continued.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
If I wait for the great definitive story of my people to come around, I'm never going to work.
As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.
You can't stand at the Bellagio and watch these seven story fountains and not go, 'That's something of extraordinary man-made beauty.'
The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.
I think the father-son love story is a universal one which transcends color.
There is no story that can't be improved by adding zombies.
There's so much emphasis on the economic might of China, of Southeast Asia, Asian 'Super Tigers' and things like that. But nobody was really looking from the perspective of a family story, of these individuals.
If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.
In most kung fu films, they want to create a hero who's always fighting a bad guy. In the story of Ip Man, he's not fighting physical opponents. He's fighting the ups and downs of his life.
The American story is a story of great moments and dreadful moments.
In first grade, I told my friends I had a third story in my house filled with jewels and lions.
I know it's such a boring interview sometimes with us at 'American Horror Story', but I just can't say a word. I would certainly love to be back, that's for sure. It's such a great job.
I always write from a personal place - whether it be about my friends or myself or a story that I heard.
I was one of those goofy kids whose year narrowed down to focus on Christmas from about September on. I guess I was like Ralphie in 'A Christmas Story,' in that I would get swept up into the anticipation of the holiday, watching the lights go up, hearing the songs in the stores, getting special Christmas issues of comics and all that.
There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don't get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it's going to come out how it's going to come out.
I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.
The most fun part for an actor is the writing and the story and the character. That's very fulfilling.
Listen to other people tell their story, but don't believe them. You know that it's just a story that is only true for them, but listen because the communication can be wonderful.
I wanted to tell the story of Luong Ung, who's a dear friend of mine.
It's an unfortunate situation. After such a great play I felt like I got hit late, no flag, broke my hand. That's it. That's pretty much been the story for the past three weeks, and obviously at some point something catastrophic was going to happen, and I broke my hand.
Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.
It all starts with a very solid, well-executed script, where the story is very clear and everybody is rowing in the same direction. That's always good; that's a constant.
On the movie side of things, the difficulties come with so few movies being made, and when they are, it seems that it's a marketing game. Story sometimes takes a backseat to that one grand marketing idea.
For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.
Some people came up with story lines where Colonel Potter moves in with Klinger, and we become a 1950s' odd couple. I said, 'Come on, let's do something significant.'
