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’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

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

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

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.

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.

It’s hard work making movies. It’s like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it’s emotional, tense work. If you don’t really love it, then it ain’t worth it.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

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

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

You just don’t know when you get in the editing room what you will need as a link or a tool for a transition. If you’re in a room, and there’s a kettle boiling, get a shot of it. Don’t worry if people think you’re nuts.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

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.

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

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

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

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

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

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

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

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 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.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

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

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

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

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

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

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

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.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

I will make action movies, I think, for a few more years, another five years.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

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.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

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

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

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

My movies just kind of sneak up on you. I don’t have to worry too much about what everybody is going to say. Anyway, I really don’t pay attention to what the world says about my movies. I just care about what my buddies think.

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

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

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