I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

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.

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 have been a youngster and I know speeches are boring.

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.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

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.

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 story has its demands.

Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.

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

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.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

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.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

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.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

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.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

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.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

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.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

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.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

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

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

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.

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.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

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

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

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

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.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

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

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won’t die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn’t have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

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.

Even if we give parents all the information they need and we improve school meals and build brand new supermarkets on every corner, none of that matters if when families step into a restaurant, they can’t make a healthy choice.

If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

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

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

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.

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

You just feel a little odd when you don’t get your kind of food. Fortunately, there are Indian restaurants all over the world.

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