Pedro Almodovar Quotes

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.

I don't remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he'd make them up.

I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.

I'm great at telling stories with the kids. I do all my different accents. We make our own stories up all the time, the four of us, me and Hannah and the kids.

There might be a proper age to know how to tell a story, but there's no proper age to start telling them.

The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

When I was as little as four years old, my mom would give me a pen and paper and tell me to write a story to keep me busy.

Back in the old days, when I was a child, we sat around the family table at dinner time and exchanged our daily experiences. It wasn't very organized, but everyone was recognized and all the news that had to be told was told by each family member. We listened to each other and the interest was not put on; it was real.

I remember bossing my younger siblings around and making them put on shows and skits with me.

I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.

Since when I was little, I would always write a script and tell my sister, 'Read this line. I'm going to film it.'

When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.

My favorite book is 'Go Away Big Green Monster.' I wrote it for my granddaughter Adrian, who was in the third grade at the time.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

The stories in 'Jim the Boy' are either made up or appropriated from some source other than my family. But the idea of a family telling stories to the kid, often to impart some kind of lesson, that's very familiar, and that's the way that I grew up.

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.

When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.

My poor sister was forced to be in the plays that I would write. We would go to my grandma's retirement building and perform 'Phantom of the Opera.'

I'm one of those sad cases who've never wanted to be anything but a writer. I started writing my first novel when I was five years old. I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember spending considerable time trying to get the title right, though this had more to do with crayon colour than scansion.

As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.