I have definitely been curious and involved in the process; even as a young actor. I was always looking at where the camera was, what story it was telling. And as my experience grew, I wanted to know even more.

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

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.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

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.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

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

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

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.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

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.

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

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.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

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

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

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.

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

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.

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

The age in which we live, this non-stop distraction, is making it more impossible for the young generation to ever have the curiosity or discipline… because you need to be alone to find out anything.

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

Many admire, few know.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

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

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

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.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

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.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

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.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

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

When I write, I try to become different characters.

I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

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

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.

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

Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

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.

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

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.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.