There are enough stories about my family. We have all been in the public eye.
Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.
All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you're just playing about.
Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.
What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.
I like stories where people have to face some big demons internally. It always seems to be an element of horror, because it's pretty scary to have to face yourself and the things you're most worried about: your own abilities and your own capabilities and your own level of competence in being a hero.
Most of these wild animals depart in autumn when the sun changes their behavior and they feel the urge to migrate or go off alone. While they are with us, however, they become characters in my books, articles, and stories.
I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.
Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
CNN is pretty consistently on the left, if you look at their choice of stories, what they play up. It's not what they say. It's what they highlight.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well.
I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.
Some of those stories in local newspapers are just as dull and boring as the stories that I get from on-line services, which are basically sort of straight news.
With newspapers cutting foreign bureaus and budgets shrinking for long-form, investigative journalism, documentary filmmakers are often filling a void nowadays in the media landscape with their ability to spend time with their stories and subjects.
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
I try to tell a lot of stories to make my students aware that the world is a very cool place with many problems that need solving, and that they all can help solve them.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.
Sure, women sportswriters look when they're in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?
If you're going on a plane journey, you're more likely to take one of my stories than 'Finnegan's Wake.'
I always wanted to experience what performance would be like without the fourth wall, so I formed a company in Australia, and we did avant-garde theater, playing with gender norms, conversations about race - we just had a box of issues that we wanted to subvert with our stories, with dance.
I suppose I do have an interest in stories that show complexity.
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.
Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them - and they might hurt us - a lot less.
I'm a 50-year-old guy making music for over 20 years. I've been writing songs since I was 20, so it's really been 30 years, and it's always been personal, but I've always told stories.
My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.
Film is just a different version of what we did round the campfire when we were Neanderthals. We tell stories so people can learn things and relativise things.
Everything I've done has always been my own made up world with its own rules and its own made up stories.
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.
There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
I'm half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That's why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I've seen so many.
As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.
