We need to hear stories from older women. There's a wealth of wisdom and real resilience there, but they're silenced.

It's time to listen to the stories of the Indigenous; we are blessed as a country to look to the wisdom of a really old country.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

I loved 'Monsoon Wedding' and 'Lunchbox' because they had 'real' stories. I wish there are more films made like them.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

All the information you could want is constantly streaming at you like a runaway truck - books, newspaper stories, Web sites, apps, how-to videos, this article you're reading, even entire magazines devoted to single subjects like charcuterie or wedding cakes or pickles.

Neil Gaiman is a star. He constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, including all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

I think I do believe in the afterlife; I have heard stories from people who I can completely trust that have seen ghosts.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

The best part of my job is being able to travel to places to investigate powerful stories, many of which contains unsolved mysteries and deaths. To me as a documentarian and paranormal investigator, this puts the adventure in my life and meaning to my job.

When you have an American mother from the Midwest and an Egyptian father, you travel back and forth and see such completely different stories in the news about the exact same events. It makes you think, 'How is anybody able to understand or even have a dialogue when the basis of information is just so completely different?'

I want to work with directors who can tell intimate stories in a way that feels universal and with a big enough scope and depth to travel outside of Iceland.

I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.

Yes, there is a way I was taught to think that's very suited to writing. And, of course, I'm thankful to have grown up in a world filled with stories.

I kind of just write what I like to write. I'm thankful that readers of different ages seem to connect to my stories. I don't consciously think about age demographics when I'm working on my comics.

I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.

Teaching does allow me to keep one foot in the youthful waters I tend to occupy in my novels, so I'm thankful for that. My students also remind me on a daily basis that the stories I collected during my district attorney days are actually interesting to people who haven't had that experience.

Given that everyone's got a voice, it's the age of the democratisation of information through digital technology. That means women can rise up, and people of colour can rise up, and these stories are much more present to us. And that's great.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

Nothing connects with people like humanity. That doesn't mean you have to tell slice-of-life stories all the time. But you know, with so many options in technology, the consumer's not really that interested in advertising... They are interested in great stories. That transcends any medium.