If you want to be a writer, write a little bit every day. Pay attention to the world around you. Stories are hiding, waiting everywhere. You just have to open your eyes and your heart.
If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.
If I had a script that I was ready to shoot tomorrow, I'd work on it every day until we got into production as soon as possible, but I don't have that script yet, so I'm trying to find and support writers, really young writers and hopefully come across a story that I wanna tell one day.
In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people's words - I just didn't get the appeal of that.
Eventually, it came to this place like, 'I'd like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.' 'Man of Tai Chi' became the story to tell.
Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.
I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.
But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
I look for stories everywhere.
The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley.
I'm always trying to look for how I can find human stories that aren't just dramas.
There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.
Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.
What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.
I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.
The process of starting up a new film is one of looking through a lot of material and trying to find something you really like. And it does sometimes take a minute.
Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'
I've got to be out doing a million things. That's how I find stories. That's how I get the relationships and get the projects that I get with the writers, the directors.
I had to find stories no one else was writing, so I got away from the quarterback and the coach. I'm still looking for stories no one else has written.
The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere.
I often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.
