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.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Many people feel so pressured by the expectations of others that it causes them to be frustrated, miserable and confused about what they should do. But there is a way to live a simple, joy-filled, peaceful life, and the key is learning how to be led by the Holy Spirit, not the traditions or expectations of man.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

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.

There is no such thing as a lovers‘ oath.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

I was from a small town, and nobody really expects you to leave, especially before you graduate. That doesn’t happen.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

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

I learned early to drink beer, wine and whiskey. And I think I was about 5 when I first chewed tobacco.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

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

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I think I have a certain respect for people, you know. And I guess a lot of times I expect that respect to go both ways.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

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.

Housework never really bothered me… what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life… when you’re a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn’t the fact that you do the laundry.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

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

Differences exist in practice and organization between the Lord’s Church and man-made institutions.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

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.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

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

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

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.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

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.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

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 never played with anything like toys.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

When I was a kid, I never thought much about football. I thought about following in my family’s footsteps and going into professional wrestling.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

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.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

There’s a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.