I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.
TV is generally an unfriendly environment for directors because you're expected to come in and tell a story in the voice of the show that already exists and just fill in the blanks and then submit it back.
E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.
Sometimes I realize halfway through a story, I'm like, 'Why would anyone care about this? It's uninteresting.'
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.
So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history - and history of repression.
Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.
If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.
The picture alone, without the written word, leaves half the story untold.
I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.
Universal vaccination may well be the greatest success story in medical history.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Many a good newspaper story has been ruined by over verification.
My job is to get to the heart of a story, to find out what's really going on; to get it verified and, then, to get it out to as many people as possible as fast as.
Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.
If you're making a film about a band or a songwriter or whomever, there's a publisher, there's a record label, and there are people who are vested interests in that film. But with back-up singers, because they did stuff for everybody, there's no one party that has any vested interest in seeing the story told.
I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.
The moral of the story is not to listen to those who tell you not to play the violin but stick to the tambourine.
The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.
