I think romance is a tool comedy is a tool and drama is a tool. I really just want to tell stories that challenge the viewer move people make you laugh perhaps push an idea about being open-minded but never settle on a genre or an opinion. I hate genre. I like movies that are original in their approach.

Most of the time it's the role. Sometimes it's the story and sometimes it just the paycheck. It's the little movies that come out as stories or the fact that I have work to go out you know what I'm saying you can only be out so long without work you start getting antsy.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene and I loved creating those but I never really had great stories to string them together.

We hear the stories every day now: the father who puts on a suit every morning and leaves the house so his daughter doesn't know he lost his job the recent college grad facing up to the painful reality that the only door that's open to her after four years of study and a pile of debt is her parents'. These are the faces of the Obama economy.

I loved fantasy but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better - as in the 'Chronicles Of Narnia ' 'The Wizard Of Oz ' 'The Phantom Tollbooth ' the 'Dungeons & Dragons' cartoon on Saturday morning in the '80s.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings about making money about doing stories that are easy to cover.

It was definitely a part of our life. I mean my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time so it wasn't just my dad's story it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.

My mom used to tell me stories at night read books to me - and I read 'em over and over and over again. And you know what I learned from that? I went back and looked at everything - Why do I like reading the same stories over and over and over again? What was I some kind of nincompoop? No - the narrative gave me connection with my mom.

I was proud to share the stories of my friends at Georgetown Law who have suffered dire medical consequences because our student insurance does not cover contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy.

Although awareness of cancer's prevalence in the United States improves and medical advances in the field abound pancreatic cancer has largely been absent from the list of major success stories.

I'm receiving 300 to 500 letters every week from people telling me that God used my stories to save their marriage or to introduce them to Christ or to heal a relationship that had been broken.

The whole Haley-Nathan marriage deal was a pretty good twist huh? I hope we got all of you with it. That particular story line even suprised me when I read it it's a good one and it'll provide for some good stories to come.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love you'll never make it.

True love stories never have endings.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

Crime and legal stories broadly speaking are just where my interest happens to lie.

What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong what's legal and illegal ethical and unethical moral and immoral.

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

Growing up my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head that I couldn't afford to actually do.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream hope any hope go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased fight any foe win or lose live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.

I'm most interested in working and learning from different people and telling good stories.

A love of books of holding a book turning its pages looking at its pictures and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.

For four years I listened to stories of intelligence failures and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system but that the system is so arcane.