I started writing about New York as soon as I arrived. I was 19. I used to write short stories and send them out.
Ever since I can remember I was telling stories and had a huge interest in other people and what made them tick.
Usually writer’s block arises when something is wrong internally with the story.
Remember, if you don’t feel passionate about the characters and subject of your story, your readers won’t either.
If you can’t write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.
A message I’ve been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can’t do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.
I loved the old stories in National Lampoon, like the original story the movie Vacation was based on. I used to laugh at them until I cried.
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
People sing each other’s songs and they cultivate standards. That’s the reason why we have folk music and folk stories. History is told through song.
I think you should only wear jewellery if it has a story behind it.
Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.
I don’t think I’ve ever really pursued telling my story, but I think things come to you at the right time.
To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can’t just be a movie fan.
She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren’t the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.
I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don’t do that, I tell jokes – the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
It’s a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.
Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.