I don't know if it's a sadistic side or whatever, but you take characters and put them in really awful situations and make them go through that. And it's very satisfying as a director to explore that, to tell those stories and to explore those themes, because it is so human.
I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?
I like real stories.
When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.
My low-budget films, more than anything, taught me that you've got to create cool, likable characters and great stories because, if you don't, it doesn't matter how cool it might look - no one is going to care about it.
'Axe Cop' is an animated show that just started on Fox that is based off the comic book series. And here's the hook: it's written by a 5-year-old. This 5-year-old has a brother who's, like, 28 and is in the business, and the little brother kept coming up with all these awesome stories for this character he dreamed up called Axe Cop.
I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.
I've been acting since second grade, telling stories, making my parents laugh here and there, so I'm hoping my 'thing' is acting. But I also make a really good bread pudding.
I started writing stories as a child.
We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality.
These are stories you hear... of people sitting in a mall and being spotted, and you think it will happen to you. And when you're fresh off the boat, and new in Bombay, you want those kind of things! They are magical fables. You want to, somewhere, be a part of it, something people will read about. But reality is different.
I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.
I'd usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.
I started as a writer for magazines, and soon they asked me to illustrate my stories. I started from the bottom of the bottom. And I climbed the stairs, one by one.
Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.
But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
My goals are to tell meaningful stories through songs and touch people's lives... and hopefully make a living doing it.
I like the nice guys. I like when they show the stories, the human element behind it all.
There's a lot of mythological stories you can tell. There's not just one. I appreciate all of those different kinds, but what I was personally missing was grand, classic, true-north hero. Pure and simple emotion, and also aiming for big time emotion, like love story as well, in a very sincere way. Like 'Superman: The Movie' had done for me.
Do awards change careers? Well, I haven't heard of many stories where that's the case. It's a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who've done well that year in certain people's eyes, and it's nothing more than that.
Think of it: television producers joining with newspapers to tell stories. It's journalism of the future. Advertising will follow the crowd - the 'crowd' being viewers and readers, of course, which could bring revenue back into journalism.
I ended up reading comics and just started drawing at a very young age. By high school, I was putting together longer stories. In college, I started doing strips for the newspaper and doing mini-comics. It sort of grew in scope and scale over time.
I like small stories.
With Groo, I try to do one story every book. Sometimes the stories are better if they go a little longer, and I choose to do it in four issues.
I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.
One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.
We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
Tell me, why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.
I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.
I love the kind of movies I watched when I was a kid. But, I also love telling great stories.
The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.
For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.
Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.
Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.
