A show could be 10 minutes, seven minutes, 94 minutes. We just need to tell the stories that need to be told.
Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.
I have been addicted to crime since I was born. I was making up crime stories when I was a 4- or 5-year-old kid.
I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.'
I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie.
I always wanted to tell stories and act.
I'm super excited to have people hear little stories about my life, the lives of my friends, people I know.
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.
I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy; reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.
The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.
The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell.
I've had the privilege of meeting and/or interviewing most of the top metal and hard rock artists at various points in my career and sharing their stories and music with millions of fans on air through TV and radio.
Anyone with a smart phone is a potential eyewitness cameraman capturing and transmitting stories at speeds that turn Reuter photos and traditional reporting into, well... yesterday's news.
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.
As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.
I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.
The idea of taking classic American stories and reinterpreting them for a time and place is not just commercially viable. These stories also carry a sensual nature of what it meant to be an American, and they deserve to be reinterpreted.
Frankly, I've got to admit that I'm not perfect and have made some mistakes as some of the colourful stories about me reveal.
I do sometimes watch 'Dr. Who' and while the stories barely make sense, if at all, the doctor is such great company I don't care.
The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.
From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.
I believe all stories are love stories, and there are kinds and kinds of love, so I will always write about love, but not necessarily romance.
It's a human desire to be scared. On some level, that's how we survived - that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it's just, 'What are you doing? Don't go in the basement!'
As an actress I just want to tell beautiful stories.
Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.
I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night.
Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.
Survivor has been such a hit, and out of that have come so many interesting stories from people that we don't see on the big screen. We have helped make them incredible celebrities.
People love stories; they use stories to make sense of the world.
I try to find scripts of stories that kinda celebrate the human condition... let's talk about the tough world out there and the human spirit overcoming adversity.
By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
I'd like to, when it's all said and done, say that I have at least a few stories that I feel proud of.
I'm inspired by almost everything I come across in life, and one way or another they find themselves sneaking into my stories.
I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.