I always had this non-stop drive. I had to keep sending stories out and every once in awhile I'd get something accepted or get the little trickle of positive feedback.
For 'The Bestseller'... there was hardly any research, but I had to give each person a quirk and develop their stories so that it would relate to who they are.
I'm all about telling stories. I like people to picture the music video in their head when they're just listening to the song.
I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
I think the more web video there is, the more press you'll get, as well as all the people who want to tell stories that haven't been told before but can't do that on TV because different stories are a risk.
I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.
Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.
I met a lot of women in the military with Meg Ryan, and they were remarkably impressive: Competent and strong and not versions of men, but versions of women. And they had stories to tell about how difficult it had been for them.
Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.
It's a director's job to tell a story and he's very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that's exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn't understand but he told a wonderful story.
There is not a great Spanish tradition of ghost stories. But in the period of Franco, you'd find these ghost stories: sort of hidden political movies that were supposed to be about ghosts but were about something else.
In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here.
It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.
I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.
The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.
Honestly we never lied to people about who we were. Usually the wackier interviews came to pass because the interview subjects, aware that we were Comedy Central, just wanted to get their stories out.
People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
College is the reward for surviving high school. Most people have great fun stories from college and nightmare stories from high school.
I never get used to the red carpets and premieres, to be honest, but when you're walking down the red carpet promoting stories such as 'Mabo,' it means everything to me.
I wrote for years before I was ever published, and I don't think I could ever stop. That said, I was also a veterinarian before I sold my first book, and I still volunteer my time to help with animal welfare causes. So that is a career I would be happy to return to - while still secretly writing strange stories back in my doctor's office.
For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane.
I think the Christ-myth stories make great stories, whether it's 'The Matrix' or 'Braveheart,' they all are tapping into some kind of deep myth in our DNA, and by myth I don't necessarily mean false.
Our line of work is very cynical, and a lot of it is driven by cynicism, cruelty, and meanness. It's easier to believe the negative stuff than the positive stuff. The feel-good stories don't usually spend a lot of time on the front pages.
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.
Although awareness of cancer's prevalence in the United States improves and medical advances in the field abound, pancreatic cancer has largely been absent from the list of major success stories.
There are so many fantastic stories and I want to bring Thor and Odin and the other gods into the modern world, just like I did with the Greeks and 'Percy Jackson.' I'll give the books an urban setting and have young people interacting with the Norse gods.
I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.
There are some ghost stories in Japan where - when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet - a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It's a very scary story.
He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.
A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.
Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
Both my parents are first-generation success stories.
I collect axioms, paradoxes, maxims, teaching stories, proverbs, and aphorisms of all sorts, because I love to see complex ideas distilled into a few words.
I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.
I just want to make stories. They don't have to have a moral or a reason. There might be some mild cautionary notes, but they're not moral. They don't impart any Judeo-Christian ethic of any kind.
