I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.
All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
I grew up in the church, and I always kind of knew Bible stories and knew the Sunday school answers, but when I was a freshman in high school I joined youth group, and that's when I started to see radical love; that's when I started to see what Christian community is supposed to look like and what fellowship is supposed to look like.
I try to write stories that are thrilling and full of mystery and funny all at the same time, stories that raise moral questions but come up with very few moral answers, stories that emotionally touch readers through the characters.
So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue, and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.
I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.
There have been lots of stories written about all the hype over getting the genome done and the letdown of not discovering lots of cures right after.
There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
For minority actors, developing our own projects has to be the eventual path. We have a lot of stories to tell and a really unique voice. But none of that is going to be heard as long as we're just the hired hands, acting.
If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy, I've always written horror stories and monster stories, right from the beginning of my career. I've always moved back and forth between the genres. I don't really recognise that there's a significant difference between them in some senses.
I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
It just seems like the most successful, iconic love stories are not so easy or escapist. I think the ones that stay with us and resonate are full of conflict, discord and misunderstandings 'cause that's what makes drama happen or tension even if it's a comedy.
There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen.
I want to tell stories powerful people don't want you to tell. It's not worth getting out of bed otherwise.
If I told you about all the stories I don't tell, I would be violating the very boundaries I set for myself.
I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.
My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother's sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely.
I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.
I look for those moments that are 'gee whiz' moments. There's some 'gee whiz' stories in our show, and they can't be written like A-1 in the Times. They have to be written more like Page 6 in the Post.
I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.
I hope before I am getting too old and when my mind is still functioning, I can tell some better stories.
It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.
I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.
I've been hit in the head a lot, but I don't think I have any problems, but I can't, for the life of me, remember a lot of my road stories and good times. When times are bad enough, that's all you can ever think about.
I now do my own cabaret act, singing and telling stories about my life.
For me, stories were brothers, sisters and friends, filling the long hours between childhood and adolescence, holding up a true mirror in which I might find out who I was rather than a distorted reflection of who I was expected to become.
I don't want to do sing-and-dance routine. I believe script is the king, so I would go for powerful stories.
I am immediately disinterested when I hear mountain-climbing stories.
Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.
What a stupid attitude we have in this country to personal stories.
Tattoos are like stories - they're symbolic of the important moments in your life. Sitting down, talking about where you got each tattoo and what it symbolizes, is really beautiful.
We've got so many stories to tell, you know, we could take on the world.
Comedy is so fun. I don't know how these people can make movies and work on them for four months and they're these sob stories. I don't know how emotionally you get through that.