Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn't worth the time and effort.

For most Americans Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.

The stories that I want to tell especially as a director don't necessarily have a perfect ending because the older you get the more you appreciate a good day versus a happy ending. You understand that life continues on the next day the reality of things is what happens tomorrow.

I'm kind of a good girl - and I'm not. I'm a good girl because I really believe in love integrity and respect. I'm a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That's what the stories in my music do.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news but in hindsight I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling but there's another message in there which is a celebration of making wild funny stories.

For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.

Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy just allowing myself to tell jokes allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them but as I wrote my own I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have and take for granted: hot showers enough food friends routines.

I've published one book before and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany about fitness.

If the Indian people want stories written about themselves how they want them told they are going to have to make them they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.

As a novelist I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

Stories can conquer fear you know. They can make the heart bigger.

The first syndicating I tried was when two partners and I created a production company in 1952. We wanted to syndicate famous Bible stories and sell them for $25 a show.

I heard so many stories from Gaomi's peasants that I had an irrepressible urge to write them down. Today Gaomi's peasants know that they have become famous around the world through my writings but I think they are a little puzzled by this.

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it.

As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course as we all know from fairy stories when you achieve that ambition you find out you don't want it.

There is a common theme though in the stories I have told which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.