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.

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 start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

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.

Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

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

People don’t usually compliment your character.

Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

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

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.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

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

One of the amazing things about ‚Seven Samurai‘ is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you’ve got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

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

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

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

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.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

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

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

I like to change characters and then, slowly I believe the audience treat me as, like an actor who can fight. It’s not like an action star.

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.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

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.

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.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

The formation of one’s character ought to be everyone’s chief aim.

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.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

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.

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.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

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.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

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.

Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

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