When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
If there’s a magic pony in the story, chances are I’ll read it.
It's always a long goddamn story. Every time you ask anyone anything really important, it's a long story.
When you tell a story and connect with somebody through an emotion that's why they like songs.
I don't know if I've ever written anything that's not a bill! I do write stories but I don't put a stamp on them. I wrote a story for my wife over Christmas and gave it to her as a present because she asked me to, but I don't put a stamp on things and send them to people.
Every Story is different, Every Movie is different, Every Director is different.
I do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.
No profession, trade, or calling, is overcrowded in the upper story.
Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I began a new story. My characters are my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.
The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.
I like it to stay very organic, and to remember a personal story behind all my subjects.
There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.
It doesn't matter if a character is a lawyer, a cop or a geography teacher. If there's a story in there, where the character has a passion and a fire in his belly and story to tell, then it's enough for an actor to get excited about.
The only difference is that religion is much better organized and has been around much longer, but it's the same story with different characters and different costumes.
It’s the leftover humans. The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprises. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs. Which in turn brings me to the subject I am telling you about tonight, or today, or whatever the hour and color. It’s the story of one of those perpetual survivors –an expert at being left behind.
A really humbling experience that we've had was touring on Post-Nothing, was having people come up to us and tell that story about Post-Nothing. Especially as the tour went on, people saying, "I listened to your album when it first came out and I listened to it every day for the summer of 2009. That was my album for that summer; that was my album for this time in my life. " When somebody tells you that, it's a pretty amazing feeling, and very humbling.
Based on my own experience, when you're going through adolescence you don't know how the world works. You can't set a story in the world you live in because you don't know what a utility bill is, or how to budget your paycheck.
How stupid lovers can be! But if they were not, there would be no story.
My songs always tend to have a good element to the story. That is who I am - an optimistic person.
A bit ridiculous, but true. The moral of this story is to separate men and women when analyzing number of sexual organs.