The power of pop culture stories should not be underestimated, and there is an enormous potential for inspirational stories that can have a positive, transformative effect on our lives.

Stop exporting American jobs. Stop exporting American factories, and stop exporting American sovereignty and independence to global institutions like the World Trade Organization.

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.

The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states, and the organic laws of the territories all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?

Ghost stories really scare me. I have such a big imagination that after I watch a horror movie like 'The Grudge', I look in the corners of my room for the next two days.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem.

I had never been a comic book person before, really, because I had no access to them. Once I had access, I thought that these are just another avenue for telling stories and delving into the imagination.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

I like something where I can really use my imagination and be an active participant in the construction of the monster and usually that's in the world of the supernatural or the world of the fantastic, so that's why those kinds of stories about demons and the supernatural appeal to me or maybe I'm really interested in that subject.

I have never been able to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes - the stories in my head have always been so much more entertaining. Only books could pull me out of my own imagination, and then it was only to plunge me into someone else's.

Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.

People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder.

Some stories are true that never happened.

Certainly my personality, my sense of humor, my outlook on life was informed by the experiences of my parents and the stories they shared with me.

Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.

I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content, which I enjoy doing. What I really love doing is mixing that with humor.

It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.