When a family film is done well, there’s a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I love stories about women.

One of the amazing things about ‚Seven Samurai‘ is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you’ve got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

There should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

It’s always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

I have definitely been curious and involved in the process; even as a young actor. I was always looking at where the camera was, what story it was telling. And as my experience grew, I wanted to know even more.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‚Harry Potter“s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.