It's nice to dig deeper into people who may look one way but always have a story to tell. I obviously write about that a lot.
All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.
For better or worse, most of my writing life has been about people that work behind the scenes. I'm interested in finding extraordinary moments in otherwise normal people.
What attracts me to material are characters that I know - characters that I know people don't know but I know - and bringing them to the screen. Spotlighting voices that have not been heard before on screen.
I grew up being obsessed with old Hollywood and loving the history, what's behind the scenes, and what people don't know.
I'm always drawn to stories that people don't know about, particularly when they're inside of a story that everyone knows about.
Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
The scope of the history of women is so underplayed and not told as often as it should be.
You see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there may be many interesting stories behind them, but what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind.
If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they'd tell.
I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
Everything in my room was old and faded, but I loved that about it. It felt like there might be secrets in the walls, in the four-poster bed, especially in that music box.
You see women struggling to keep it all together while a loved one is in jail. But we don't hear about them or their struggles in a way that resonates with others. Their stories are so compelling. It's as if they are in their own little world and no one else sees them.
Some have said I focus on marginalized communities, but it's not like that was my mission statement. I've just told stories that interest me, and that I'm not seeing enough of, on groups of people and subcultures that are often not seen.
In every house, when the curtains are drawn, there's a story going on, and you never get to hear... You get the public side of things, the happy, smiling, social activities.
I think every person and place is interesting, and there's an interesting story behind every door.
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar -- maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless -- and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts.
Films are very influential, and I especially feel a responsibility to tell stories that have been pushed aside. Being able to shed light on issues that need to be brought to the world.
I love writing about unknown people.
I will take the subway and look at certain women and think 'God, that woman's story will never be told. How come that lady doesn't get a movie about her?'
