Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

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

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, ‚Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.‘

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.

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

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

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

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

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.

The movie business is a big gamble.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.

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’ve had the opportunity to work with so many great directors. Different styles, as well, like Gus Van Sant. He just does the casting and the milieu and let’s you do your thing, quietly. Bertolucci, who can talk to you about your internal world in quite a creative way or just say, ‚Well, put your hand over here.‘

I just make good movies. That’s the way I thank my fans.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

I have been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years, and in 1970, when I first started directing, I said, ‚If I could pull this off, I can some day move to the back of the camera and stay there.‘

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

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.

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

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

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 start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Eventually, it came to this place like, ‚I’d like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.‘ ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ became the story to tell.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

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.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.