A Quote by Elmore Leonard

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.
There's no destination. There's no getting anywhere. There's just the going. The key to life is to make the going really fun. Because people that are like, “If I just get to this, then boom!” And then they get there and there's this dawning of an afterwards. Whereas I'm just always in the going. And it's not a frantic going like, “I gotta keep going or I'm gonna go nuts!” I can not do anything for weeks or months if I need to and just sit and read books or watch movies. I'm just as fine consuming and absorbing new art as I am trying to make it. But it's all in the going.
I usually make up stories for my kids.I like to tell them stories and make up any kind of crazy to involve them in characters. The kind of fairytales I don't like are the ones with happy endings, where there's just good and evil and things are perfect. I think when there's a good story for children it has a moral tale, so that's what I try to teach my kids.
I look at all of world mythology and folklore as my toy to play with. There are just so many characters and creatures there I want to put on paper. It's a really exciting thing for me to take material that I really love and put a new coat of paint on it and present it to this audience. And I don't have to make up any of the characters. I can just pull a book of mythology off the shelf and say, "I'll use this guy." I also hate making up names for fantasy characters. I'll just flip through these books and say, "Wow, this is way crazier than anything I could make up".
I don't use recurring characters. I do get very interested my characters while I'm working with them, and I find the process of fitting them into a story, and allowing them to create the story around themselves, fascinating. But no, I don't imagine they have a life outside of what I make for them.
But I like to listen to demos. I like to hear the finished product. It's like listening to a song - I mean, a story. If you're going to sit here and tell me a story, I just like to listen. I don't want to make them up.
Our community system is completely broken down, and you need to build that back up again and make people feel that they can make a change in life and not just sit around playing video games or on their iPhones - that they can get out there and make a difference.
I think it's just as viable a way of telling a story as anything else but for right now we like playing around with the new ways to do 3-D because I think it's only going to get better. I think that eventually we'll come home, we'll sit in our living room and there will be a little hologram that'll pop up and you'll watch these 3-D movies but you'll be able to walk around it.
The only thing you really have to practice is your ability. And this is something I do all the time. I try to teach my hand to do what I'm hearing in my head at any given second. I don't sit around and practice scales. I sit around and just try to make sure my hands are following what's coming to me.
I worked as an actor for a few years before anything happened, so I'm used to going up for auditions, and then not getting the role. But sometimes I don't read the book of the film, in case I just totally fall in love with it, and then it just becomes an obsession and you want to do it so much because you've completely fallen in love with the story and the characters. And then, if the part doesn't go your way, it's heartbreaking. So, there's a certain amount of distance you have to keep before you can throw yourself in 100%.
I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook - what I want the track to be about melodically - and then I'll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.
I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook—what I want the track to be about melodically—and then I’ll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.
Zayn's good to just sit down and chat to about pretty much anything. At the end of the night, we just sit around and talk about our life before One Direction, or anything at all, really.
I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people. When I write a scene I just try to make the characters behave in a way that feels natural to them. Sometimes that means they make a left turn and do something unexpected. Those are always the best scenes in my opinion.
I have always liked kind of outsider characters. In the movies I grew up liking, you had more complicated characters. I don't mean that in a way that makes us better or anything. I just seem to like characters who don't really fit into. You always hear that from the studio: "You have to be able to root for them, they have to be likeable, and the audience has to be able to see themselves in the characters." I feel that's not necessarily true. As long as the character has some type of goal or outlook on the world, or perspective, you can follow that story.
When I say myself, I don't mean just as a woman of color, as a girl who's growing up in the Bronx, as people growing up in some way economically-challenged, not growing up with money. It was also even just the way we spoke. The vernacular. I learned that it's alright to say "ain't." My characters can speak the way they authentically are, and that makes for good story. It's not making for good story to make them speak proper English when nobody speaks like that on the playground.
Just the same as I mix each track to connect them together to build a story, it's the same with the message, each scripture and passage is building up a story and a testimony in a way that's going to connect with people.
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