I'm perfectly proud of the work I did, looking back at it. I know I've had a bit of a revision since my 'Big Finish' stories came out.
When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.
Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.
There are a thousand weird untold stories in the Australian film industry, this has been one of them.
Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.
Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.
It seems like everyone's got an agenda, and the agenda seems to be selling magazines or air time with sensational stories.
I think it's important for not just me but women of color, trans women, and people who are marginalized to be telling stories of themselves. It's important for us to be behind the lens.
I realize how much my life lines up with artists like Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. My sound comes from church, but the stories come from actual personal experience, being out there in the streets living life.
Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.
My specialty is two things: music or really strange stories.
I'm always captivated by stories of women who find a way to be daring - misbehaving women.
I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.
I'm not a big fan of the post-Armageddon stories, where Denzel Washington is walking around in a torn coat.
I did my holy communion, and it was amazing how quickly the stories of the Bible and God and Jesus got under my skin.
I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.
I am interested in personal stories because that's when people become expressive, spontaneous and heartfelt.
I'm looking to find good stories, not big commercial pieces of work.
What I love about what I get to do is that I'm allowed to create the stories that I want to tell with minimal interference by some very big corporations like Microsoft and Sprint and EA and BioWare. The advantage that these tech companies have is that they understand the space organically, versus traditional media companies.
Somebody asked me earlier if I thought it was really important to tell stories about women's struggles. And I said yes, but at the same time, it's also important to tell stories about women's triumphs, women being slackers, women being criminals, women being heroes.
I was a freelancer all through my twenties. I did about one story a month and I wanted to write fiction, so the stories that I would do were precursors to 'Sex and the City.'
In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.
I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.
I live in a country where I'd say nine out of ten people know me when I walk through the streets. There's people taking pictures, there's tabloids trying to make up stories. I'm used to that. The same thing when I'm in Australia or the U.K.: I get stopped.
Steven, my friend who came out to me my senior year, was a huge Madonna fan. So I may know all the words to 'Bedtime Stories,' 'Erotica,' and a few more of her albums - and we may have watched 'Truth or Dare' a thousand times.
I enjoy doing romantic stories. I've done a lot of them.
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.
I hear all the time that boys don't like stories about girls. Which never made much sense to me. Wasn't 'Terminator' about a girl? And 'Alien'? Hell, I grew up on 'The Wizard of Oz.' People enjoy stories about anything if they're good stories.
I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it's a better way of telling the stories.
In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.
I didn't really know how to write jokes, so I just told weird, long stories about being tall and beautiful and wealthy in New York. I'd tell them very seriously, but I kind of looked like a drag queen at the time with big wigs and crazy 12-inch platform heels.
I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology.
As long as it comes across, the characters are well-served, the stories are good, and people like it, that's it for me. I'm a happy guy.
I don't really know the story of the Pied Piper. I don't read stories, first of all. I just remember either a rabbit or a rat leading people out of the village with a flute. That's all I can tell you.
