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.

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.

Temptation is just the feeling that you’re the most independent person on planet Earth. That you know everything. That’s something that we all go through as a kid. Now, this lifestyle that I’m in, the same thing exists! But it’s 10 times worse, because everything is at my disposal. When you’re in the limelight, you can get anything you want.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

When I was little… I didn’t relate to princesses. I saw Maleficent, and I just thought she was so – she was so elegant.

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.

In the real world, children love me.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

I’ll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

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.

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.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

Well, everyone likes movies when they’re a little kid.

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.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

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.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

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

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.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

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

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

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.

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

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

Where I grew up – I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights – that’s every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don’t want your kids to hear growing up.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

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

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

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 grew up in a funny way.

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.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

Every story has its demands.

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.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

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

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

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

My mother did not like children.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

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.

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

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Being a kid’s not easy. You’re transforming and becoming a human being. At some point, you have everyone taking care of you, and then, all of a sudden, you’re out in the world.