I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

I like to look good, my friend.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

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

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

My momma didn’t clean up floors so I could be a thug… so I could wear my pants down.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

We based the look on rock ‚n roll right from the beginning.

The fashion I’ve acquired over the years is so sacred to me – from costumes to couture, high fashion to punk wear I’ve collected from my secret international hot spots. I keep everything in an enormous archive in Hollywood.

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

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.

I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle.

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

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.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

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.

It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

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.

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 love Dolce & Gabbana. I love Versace. I love the crazy, more eccentric stuff.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

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.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute.

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.

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

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

I’m easy to look like, so there are lots and lots of Dolly look-alikes.

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

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

Oh my God – this is scary and sad all at the same time. I literally dream about buying my own groceries. Swear to God. Because it is something that is real and normal.

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

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 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?

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

Obama’s policies have been approximately the same as Bush’s, though there have been some slight differences, but that’s not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush’s policies.

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

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Seeing is not always believing.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

There should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

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.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

The one thing I couldn’t identify with was the blue cowboy outfit he put on.

Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

Don’t dress to kill, dress to survive.

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.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Fashion is life-enhancing, and I think it’s a lovely, generous thing to do for other people.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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 like a colorful sock. I’m a sock man.