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.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

I'm going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don't I've written 14 musicals now I don't want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

Everyone has a story that makes me stronger. I know that the work I do is important and I enjoy it but it is nice to hear the feedback of what we do to inspire others.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact than the richest without meaning.

I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we as women become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.

Women want love to be a novel men a short story.

The study of history is the beginning of political wisdom.

You know it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

I'm actually reading 'World War Z' again! It's incredibly realistic and it's written as an oral history through interviews with different characters. Max Brooks wrote this book in so many different voices. There are about forty or so. It's incredible. When I finish 'World War Z' I'm going to go back and start again on the 'Game of Thrones' series.

With Vietnam the Iraq War so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.

We are all tourists in history and irony is what we win in wars.

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.