Quotes on Stories

As an African-American actor, a lot of our stories haven't been told.

I'm a bad customer for my own buildings! If I'm choosing an apartment, I choose one about five or six stories high so that I can see the people, the trees, and the world on the street. Beyond that, I lose contact with the ground!

Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.

I feel that, as a person of color, I've always been interested in the stories that are quiet and the stories that often get overlooked.

Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don't know. They're some of the greatest allies that any writer has.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Why aren't there films being made that tell ethnically diverse stories? Or why is it so impossible to allow a person of color to add their texture and their essence to a role that is not ethnically specific? I don't know why it's a novel or risky idea to consider making a film look like how our world actually looks today.

I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on.

I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.

I'm always captivated by stories of women who find a way to be daring - misbehaving women.

I don't think journalism changes. It's about digging into stories and telling them well. The basic tenets of great reporting stay the same while things around it change. Technology has made reporting easier, but it has also caused job loss. Social media has increased discussion around topics, but it has its own challenges at times.

Biographies of me have usually been compiled from old newspaper clips, untruthful publicity stories, and reminiscences of people who claim to have known me well.

You can't tell stories and really walk in someone's shoes and not have a love for them, even if they're doing horrible things.

To me, having the courage to tell your own story goes hand in hand with having the curiosity and humility to listen to others' stories.

The marvelous thing about 'Doctor Who' is that it tells stories that no one else can tell.

I'm not a lawyer, but I do know this: we need to protect our ability to tell controversial stories.

Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there's still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us.

Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.

I've met my share of guys who have insulted and assaulted my intelligence with their stories and games. I say hello and goodbye!