That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?

While tributes to Americans who had lost their lives in battle had been held in a number of towns across the nation one of the more well-known stories about the beginnings of Memorial Day is the story about General John Logan.

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them.

I love vampire stories. That's why I did the movie. Women especially were taken with that movie-even more so when it came out on video.

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.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance the memory of it.

Bad things do happen in the world like war natural disasters disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

All stories should have some honesty and truth in them otherwise you're just playing about.

Know that there is so much more to you than your body. It's not just about perfecting the steps you must trust your instincts to tell deep emotional stories through the steps that you are performing.

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.

Concepts like individuals have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

This technology will obviously become more prevalent. Who knows what will result? One thing is certain computer technology will revolutionize the way we tell stories as much as movie film has.

At its core 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people and breaking stories... and that requires virtually no technology.

Technology has saved us money in some circumstances but it has really afforded us the ability to cover stories from locations we might not have been able to in the past.

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it it can be put on the screen.

The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant pretty stories but not true.

We all know that Social Security is one of this country's greatest success stories in the 20th century.

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

I think a big part of our attraction to sport movies are the stories contained within the sports.

I don't necessarily love the sports per se I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction whatever you want to call it - mash-ups gimmick lit absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

I'm mostly a novelist these days but I have written short stories in Fantasy Science Fiction and horror.