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.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

Brad was a huge surprise to me. I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasn’t. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

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

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

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

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.

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.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Trying to meet new women, it’s always a little more difficult as opposed to calling somebody I knew that’s single and trying to rebuild that connection.

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

No man wants to settle down. It happens. Eventually you’re going to bump into somebody that makes you go, ‚Hmm, I don’t mind seeing this person every day.‘

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

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

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.

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

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

I’d love to date somebody cool, fun, funny.

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.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

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.

I’m sticking to the script, I’m putting that organic feeling back in the game.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Every once in a while I get the highly inappropriate proposal which is like, ‚Wow, Really! You don’t even know me and I don’t know you at all, and you want that to happen? Tonight? Ok, I get off work at 7.30.‘

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

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.

I’m typically single. I’m the girl who – I call it girl-next-door-itis – the hot guy is friends with and gets all his relationship advice from but never considers dating.

I don’t have many friends; I’m very much a loner. As a child I was very isolated, and I’ve never been really close to anyone.

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.

In football, I don’t have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many… Most of the time, I’m alone.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

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

Single life is so overrated.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.