I just want to tell great stories.
I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.
Just telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made.
My mama loved books; I became fascinated by the wonderful stories that came out of these things she held in her hand - and started to make them up myself.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.
It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.
I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.
Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.
When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.
At the end of the day, filmmaking is all about telling stories, and I'm just doing my part.
It doesn't feel like work. Yes, I have days that are difficult, but I'm sitting in a chair making up stories. It's what I did for fun as a kid, whether with Barbies or stuffed animals.
A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.
I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.
We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.
I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.
No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.
It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.
Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.
What's gratifying for me and interesting is that people are picking up on exactly what I want them to, which is that this is energizing people, and making them want to make stories.
There are so many difficult things and stories can make them palatable. That's the way I have always felt.
