I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I’m not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.
The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.
When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn’t mean it’s not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.
That’s what ever great writer, I believe, has done over the course of time – is they’ve figured out new ways of telling the same stories.
I just think it’s a great world to tell stories in, to tell cool stories: money, sex, fame, and scandal. Those are great subject matters to work with.
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.
Personal inspection at zero altitude. The stories come from my life – if not my own experiences, then about topics and subjects that interest me.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
I have just made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.
All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
Atari is a very sad story.
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
Each book starts from ashes really. I don’t feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I’m living.
And as he spoke, I was thinking, ’the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.