Quotes About Stories

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn't intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.

I think that people are fascinated with the stories, with human nature and the dark turns it can take.

I do know that I love placing my stories in Michigan because, if you collect all the ideas, it turns the whole state into one kaleidoscopic, frightening place. Michigan as house of horrors.

I did the X-Men, and I plotted the stories, and Roy Thomas dialogued them. And that first set of comic books that I did are the plot that the first X-Men movie was taken from, where Magneto invents a machine that turns regular humans into mutants. That's my idea.

I grew up in rural Ireland; we only had a few TV channels and had never even heard of sketch shows, but it was completely natural for me to tell jokes and stories.

In Japan, there's a TV series called Jin. It deals with time travel. I like stories about time travel. It's a story about people living in modern day that travel back to the Edo era. Those things really interest me.

Making a TV show is a lot of work. I actually feel a little duped on this subject. Nowhere in the stories about getting on a television show do you ever hear about how much hard work it is.

I've always loved 'Before and After' stories, in books, magazines, and TV shows. Whenever I read those words, I'm hooked. The thought of a transformation - any kind of transformation - thrills me. And that's the promise of habits.

In all my years of cricket, I've given hundreds of interviews and done dozens of TV shows, but what you will read in my memoir are the stories and thoughts I've never shared openly.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

Christmas was always a big holiday in our family. Every Christmas Eve before we'd go to bed, my mom and dad would read to us two or three stories and they would always be 'The Happy Prince,' 'The Gift of the Magi' and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas,' and I would like to keep that alive.

In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.'

I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.

I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.

Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.

Generally, Hollywood makes the same stories over and over. I've never wanted to do the same thing twice. If a script doesn't surprise me in some way, I simply can't commit to the project.

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

I've tried to consider stories that I have read, making them into films, but they would turn out unnatural. If a producer wants that, he should call other people. Not me.