I don't want to steal anybody's story. I very much want to use the stories that I hear to get lost in my mind, to tell a larger story.
My mother has stories of leaving me in the bath as small kid, like a 3-year-old, and there being mirrors on the side, and her going to get a towel and coming back in, and me making faces at myself, like, 'Now I'm happy. Now I'm sad.'
More than reading - much more than reading, in fact - I developed a love for telling stories from listening to two parents who really knew how to do it. And it really is an art.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.
All I wanted to do was read, to be told stories. Stories were full of excitement and emotions and characters that entertained and often inspired.
I think that's why I'm an actor: so I can tell those stories without having to really live through those stories with real consequences and real stakes, real responsibility.
That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.
Political stories in general are tough. They just don't appeal to as wide an audience.
Everybody that's employed by 'WWE' - the biggest wrestling company in the world - should be good wrestlers able to tell good stories.
I get so full off of stories that people send in of encouragement.
The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.
Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.
I've loved comics since I was very young, and I've always liked telling stories.
I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.
As a kid, I used to tell all these stories. I remember meeting a childhood friend, and we were talking. We remembered that I had made up this story about going to Mars. And she looked at me and said, 'I didn't sleep for a week after that!'
I don't like two stories. I like one story. I never grew up with stairs. I like to stick to what I know.
We remain committed to inspiring and compelling social change to the world's most pressing problems through the power of great stories and engaging our audiences to take meaningful action.
I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.
In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
My interest as an artist is to illuminate the lives of black folks. I definitely am focused on films that illustrate all that we are and all our nuance and all our complicated beauty and mess, and when you're telling those stories, you gotta have black actors.
Our best hits are real-estate stories, going back to our first, JoJo in 1991.
When we were trying to get 'Jersey Boys' off the ground, I'd get, 'The Four Seasons? Who's going to care? There's the Beatles, there's the Rolling Stones.' But people know those stories. Here was a story no one knew.
I think as more women are in positions of power, more people of color are in positions of power, the stories become more inclusive; the casts become more inclusive.
The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.
I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
After three years in L.A., I began to dream of my glory days on the boards. But it's very difficult to make a living as a theater actor in New York, which is why I moved out here, and I always had an ambition to work in television. I am a great admirer of the format, and I think it's how we tell long stories.
I think of the Jens Lekman in the songs as a completely different person who's stealing my stories.
You get guys around a campfire, and they start telling their stories. That's the fellowship that they want to be in.
English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.
At the end of the day, I'm a fan of great stories and great songs.
My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.
For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.
One of the things I've done on my shows is tell stories and do interviews.
