Storytelling Inspiration Quotes

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

When my mother talked about her brother, there was this light in her eyes. I thought, 'This is the basis of a novel.'

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

I get ideas from my own personal experiences, from my imagination, and from my research and from old stories.

I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.

You know how the best story angles often spring from that thought you have on reading an article or watching a show - that thought you have before the responsible journalist in you comes up with something boring. I usually recommend people get in touch with their deep 'reptilian brain.'

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

Write about your experiences! When I moved to L.A., I didn't have any friends, and the office janitor was the person who I saw the most. He would always come in at around 10:00 P.M., and I would still be at my desk, so I wrote a play about a first-year TV writer and the friendship that she developed with the janitor. Our stories matter.

I always wanted to write a story about a couple coming to that moment in their relationship where either they keep on going or it ends.

I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.

All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.

How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.

I do get a little disheartened when you hear about how many girls get discouraged to not pursue a career in the sciences, and I feel like seeing women that are portrayed in this way - and beyond that, just three dimensional, complicated women - those are always going to be the stories that I gravitate to most.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

The inspiration really comes first from the character and the story. That vision of what the story is, and what the character is, the world that they inhabit and what the story wants to tell. That's really what inspires me.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon... these were the kinds of characters I was thinking about as I was developing Jonas Quantum because there aren't that many brand new characters being introduced anymore.

I would love to make a Brazilian film, but it would have to be something very close to my heart. It's such a personal thing, so I'd want to do my family proud. I'd want to do justice to Brazilian cinema. I think Brazilian cinema is brilliant. I would really love to do something, but I'm just waiting for the right thing.

I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.