I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

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

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

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.

If someone is right for you, you’ll know it.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

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.

My wife used to be an anchorwoman in Arizona, so she knew John McCain, and she liked him, and I kinda liked him.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

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.

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

I love Brad in every state.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

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

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

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

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

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.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

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.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

I always play women I would date.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

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

I always wanted a great love affair: something that feels big and full, really honest, and enough. No moment should feel slight, false, or a little off. For me, it had to be everything.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

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

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

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

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

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

‚Love Story‘ is actually about a guy that I almost dated. But when I introduced him to my family and my friends, they all said they didn’t like him. All of them!