Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.
I think that emotion and good stories can cross the times.
Sometimes you're not even sure which of your stories were failures. There are things I've written that I thought were complete catastrophes when I finished with them that have gone on to generate some of my most positive feedback.
Being in the public eye, I have certainly gone through the tabloid situation where they come out with stories that are not true. I don't read or pay attention to it.
I brought in the stories many times. I don't just do animation.
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.
I want a documentary to crest by being voted on by 6000 people who are in the business of telling stories.
Kids search for what's relevant, what connects with their life... now. They know bad things happen like Hurricane Katrina. Through character driven stories, they explore what it's like to survive, thrive, and become more themselves.
But in film you always watch situations or stories that you really have no relation to. A lot of times just because there's no personal connection doesn't mean you can't connect with the film or the characters in the film.
But if I really want to produce my own work and tell stories, then I will.
You read in any war stories - World War II, whatever - that there are many, many heroes. There are the main stories you always hear about, but there are all these other little people that did things that were very important that we don't always know about.
Despite all the technical improvements, it still boils down to a man or a woman and a microphone, playing music, sharing stories, talking about issues - communicating with an audience.
People come up to me and tell me how I changed their life and I've inspired them. And they tell me their stories, and that keeps me going.
Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.
We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.
I get ideas from my own personal experiences, from my imagination, and from my research and from old stories.
I still have a lot of the stories I wrote in high school. Hand wrote... a number of them are in purple ink, rendering them illegible, a fact we should probably be forever thankful for.
I think people are so immersed in the anti-Scientology mindset by consuming tabloid media and stories about space aliens. It's baffling. When I say I want to see a more positive side of the church, all I'm saying is I want to get past these headlines that talk about aliens and Tom Cruise jumping on a sofa.
Keep your private life private. Be open to suggestions from different people. And just be nice. I have heard stories about people who are just plain rude to the press or fans.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.
On the day my daughter was born, I started writing a book for her. The plan was that, over the course of her life, I'd fill it with advice on how to be a strong woman. But along the way, I got caught up in the stories of Amelia Earhart, Sally Ride, and so many others. So how do you pick the best heroes for your kids?
There's a new television generation coming in every five or 10 years, and the classic stories stand up to being redone.
That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?
Like life itself my stories have no point and get absolutely nowhere.
When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.
I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I'm interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for - trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn't normally appeal to.
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.
I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'
A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.
People in life take on certain stories and say, 'I'm going to be defined by this story and I'm going to live up to every inch of this story.' Sometimes you realize the story isn't fulfilling you and in fact you're not living the life that you're given.
I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.
I don't have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don't find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren't interested in those stories.
