That’s what film can do in a way that TV and other long-form storytelling can’t. It gives you this very immersive moment.

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you’re going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you’re going all out.

Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: ‘There is change. Look, today’s fantastic story is tomorrow’s fact.

Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

The power of storytelling lies in its ability to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar

Every story is a journey, and every character is a traveler on that journey

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history – military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what’s generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

A gun in a film is so culturally specific to America. It looks odd in world cinema unless it’s ironic. I wonder if there are more balls in English films than guns, more nipples in French films. Guns in America’s story are a constant, a plot device, like coffee cups in European films. Guns are Hollywood

For me, I think there’s a lot more room in cable television to tell broader stories. NBC and the networks, they’re all very mainstream, and they’re a little more conservative in how they approach storytelling.

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don’t harrass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you – alas, it is true of almost every one of us!

The power of storytelling lies in its ability to connect people from all walks of life.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Some stories are true that never happened.

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

Tell me why, why can’t we try and start again? This can’t be how our story ends

You can’t tell me I ain’t fly I know I’m super fly

In 1919 I woke up famous. I’d never guessed it. If I’d known I was famous, I’d have stolen away and wept.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior.

There is no story that is not true.

If you don’t like someones story, write your own.

I kind of like that romantic image of being in a rocker with my family gathered around, all these generations in one room, listening intently to my stories.

In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own

You have no control. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

Rap is just somebody getting something off his chest. That’s all it is.