Quotes About Perspective

The older I get, the less I obsess about material stuff. In fact, stuff has become the enemy. There always seems to be more of it than I have storage in my house!

It's only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I'm skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I'm big, when I was big, I never thought about it.

The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won't leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I'm driving my kids to school, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store.

So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.

When you hear a lot of stories about Africa, and you get to a place like Kenya and other countries like that, where they think the same way we do, I was happy to find that the Schedule of Rights that I drew for the Kenyan Government was working very well.

Given a little time for the pain to subside, dreadful experiences often can be the basis of funny jokes or stories.

Maybe I'm not the right person to do it... but I've learned that I have some power to help stories be told the way they naturally need to be told.

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

Stories change people while statistics give them something to argue about.

Black girl stories aren't just for black girls: they're for everybody.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

As human beings, it's good to build stories.

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

The kind of stories I like often comes from debutant directors.

People love stories; they use stories to make sense of the world.

When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.

Everybody has their own story; everybody has their own journey.

The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else's story.