I love stories about women.

I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist, but I don’t like girls pretending to be stupid because it’s easier.

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

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.

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.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

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

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

If I were a woman, I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

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

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

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

There are certainly a lot of things that still need to change when it comes to women in the workforce.

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.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

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.

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.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

It’s an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

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.

There are a number of women who have brought about immense change in society.

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.

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn’t a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn’t be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn’t realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.

A church without women would be like the apostolic college without Mary. The Madonna is more important than the apostles, and the church herself is feminine, the spouse of Christ and a mother.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

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.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

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.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

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.

One of the best things that ever happened to me is that I’m a woman. That is the way all females should feel.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

Women – always in trouble with them, but can’t live without them.

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

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent – just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

No woman in my time will be prime minister or chancellor or foreign secretary – not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be prime minister; you have to give yourself 100 percent.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You’re looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues.

I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women’s organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man’s world.

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

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.

You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway.