A Quote by Bill Bryson

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
I'm more honest in my lyrics than I am in anything else. It's where I feel the most safe to express myself. I write about growing up, my family, Maddie and getting pregnant. If I've lived it, why wouldn't I talk about it? I guess that's been the coolest thing - realizing that it's OK to just be myself and really tell my story.
It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.
Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.
In old interviews I was still worried about being judged. I think my life was about how can I keep myself in control. How can I just get through this and be okay? And, you know, you turn the corner. You realize that you're not imprisoned by your life or your circumstances or your genetics or anything. I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.
Every GM will tell you it's an instinct. It's an instinct to be patient, to react, or act, or not to do anything at all. It just comes. What I can say is you must have a plan and a goal and a way to do things. At the end of the day, it's an instinct. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad.
So let's not use a stylus. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world. We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with - born with ten of them. We're going to use our fingers. We're going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic.
One of the things that I was kind of holding on to from 'The Daily Show' was there was an exhaustion that I would feel because we just kind of got caught up in the news cycle. You tell a story, and that's an interesting story, and then the next day we have to drop it and talk about something else. That's so unfair to the story and the people.
I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.
I have an expression I use as I've gone around the world through my career: 'You never tell another man or woman what's in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.'
Comic books are just a way to show a story. Then there are the movies, and television and exhibits like this that take the stories and make them seem so realistic. In the comic book, you're just reading a story - hopefully a good, exciting story that whets your appetite for all of this stuff to come.
People need to understand that what happens in people's homes and behind closed doors, unless you were there, you really shouldn't make any analogy or any assumption, which writers do quite a bit. It's not something I ever for one second thought about. This is not my life story, and I've never told my life story, and I have no interest in telling my life story.
I'm giving away my family's story. Who owns the family's story? I don't. But you could turn it around and ask, 'Who is to deny me to write my family's story?' I have hurt people, but I don't think in a dangerous way. But you can't tell.
In the rock 'n roll slang world, they're called rock doctors, or rock docs. They would come out to shows and like to hang backstage. You could get a prescription for anything you want from them. They just want to hang out and party. It's crazy because you can get a prescription to anything. It doesn't even matter what kind of doctor they are.
I'm not a comic book guy. I've never been to Comic-Con. I don't know anything about that. It's a whole different world.
I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
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