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.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‚Harry Potter“s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

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

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

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

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

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

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

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.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I’m not someone who sits at home and doesn’t like to go out, doesn’t like to watch movies. I like to live my life.

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.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

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.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

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.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

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.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there’s always a question of taste.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

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.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

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

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.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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.

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.

Football games are on TV, and it doesn’t affect stadium attendance at all. It’s the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

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.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don’t have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

I love making movies, but there’s nothing like performing live.

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

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

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.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

My friend James Cameron and I made three films together – True Lies, The Terminator and Terminator 2. Of course, that was during his early, low-budget, art-house period.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

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

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

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

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

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