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

I like being a writer.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

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.

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.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

In my career as a director, there’s always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: ‚What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?‘ At that time you have to say: ‚OK, forget that and just go ahead.‘

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

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

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.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

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.

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.

God has given us two hands – one to receive with and the other to give with. We are not cisterns made for hoarding; we are channels made for sharing.

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.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

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

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

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

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

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

I like the idea of putting your Christmas wish list up and letting people share it.

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.

The song ‚Innocent‘ is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

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.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

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

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

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.

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.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

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.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

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.

People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.

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.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

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

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

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

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.

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.

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

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

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

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.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

Our best thoughts come from others.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.