If you haven't got an idea, write a story anyway.
When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories.
Not every story has a happy ending, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth telling.
I want a body of work; I want a good story after a good story.
Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.
Short stories are like individual jewel stones on a necklace, wonderful in themselves like standalone gleaming entities of semantic intensity.
When I was younger, I loved graveyards. They weren't spooky so much as mysterious. Each tombstone another story to uncover. Another life to learn about. Now that I'm older - I won't say how old - I hate graveyards. The only life - or rather death - I see in the tombstones is my own.
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.
You know what's it's changed is my appreciate for the art form of making cinema. I don't want to act as much as I want to tell stories. I want to be a part of the whole collective and pull all of the pieces together. That's what I love about directing.
I don't like the word 'autobiography. ' I rather like the term 'autofiction. ' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.
Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.
What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
I think that people have to have a story. When you tell a story, most people are not good storytellers because they think it's about them. You have to make your story, whatever story it is you're telling, their story. So you have to get good at telling a story so they can identify themselves in your story.
As a teenager I wrote to R. A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R. A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
Everyone was very deeply involved in the world of 'The Lord of the Rings'. From the wardrobe department to lighting, all were fascinated with the story. This is something that does not happen usually.
I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.
David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.
There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the mean-spirited would consider there to be a competition at all.
As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do not fit our present needs. " But there are times when I want to reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note. "