You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
- Mark Twain
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
- J R R Tolkien
People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not."
"Shouldn't the storyteller believe it."
"The storyteller should tell it.
- Cecelia Ahern
It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
- Mitch Albom
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them.
They move on. They move away.
The moments that used to define them are covered by
moments of their own accomplishments.
It is not until much later, that
children understand;
their stories and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories
of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones,
beneath the water of their lives.
- Paulo Coelho
We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.
- Paulo Coelho
I didn't literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.
- Sherman Alexie
We writers are the worst kind of cruel,
Because we worship our own stories and poems,
And what human can compete with metaphors?
Writers stand still and yet vacate our homes
Inside our fantasies. We are word-whores,
With libidos and egos of balsa wood.
We'd have sex with our books, if only we could.
- Sherman Alexie
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
- Janet Evanovich
I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.
- Sergio Aragones
Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.
- Sergio Aragones
I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.
- Darren Aronofsky
I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.
- Jane Austen
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
- Dave Barry
I've produced and gotten to do a lot of optimistic love stories, and that was so where I was at for 10 years in my life. And now I feel like, Okay, now I know how to do that. I want to get scared again; I want to feel the way I felt when I started my company, when I started producing.
- Drew Barrymore
After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories-we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on.
- Allison Hoover Bartlett
When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
- Mario Batali
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
- Haruki Murakami
People come up to me and tell me how I changed their life and I've inspired them. And they tell me their stories, and that keeps me going.
- Valerie Bertinelli
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
- Jeff Bezos
The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.
- Judy Blume
With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.
- Don Bluth
I think the work that they do and the style of 3D graphics is absolutely fabulous and I think it's a great brush to use for some stories. And there are other brushes that I think are exclusive to a different kind of story.
- Don Bluth
Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
- Ray Bradbury
I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.
- Ray Bradbury
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?
- Lara Flynn Boyle
We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.
- Madeleine L Engle
When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance.
- David Brin
I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.
- Harold Brodkey
When I was a teenager, 'Playboy' was the most interesting magazine in the world, and not just for the playmates. I liked the interviews and the stories, and all that, but nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn't interest me.
- Chester Brown
As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.
- Dan Brown
Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children's bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.
- Louise Brown
I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.
- Bill Bryson
Sail the main course in a simple sturdy craft. Keep her well stocked with short stories and long laughs. Go fast enough to get there but slow enough to see. Moderation seems to be the key.
- Jimmy Buffett
There were other stories and other names. Second Base Stace, who had breasts in fourth grade and let some of the boys feel them. Vincent, who took acid and tried to flush a sofa down the toilet. Sheila, who allegedly masturbated with a hot dog and had to go to the emergency room. The list went on and on.
- Stephen Chbosky
Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
- Mark Burnett
I have always been drawn to coming-of-age stories and books and movies featuring compelling young characters.
- Emily Giffin
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
- Italo Calvino
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.... Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.
- Italo Calvino
There's a great argument about how many men he actually killed. People would tell stories and then as we all know as stories get told over and over again, they get embellished, facts get changed, elaborated upon, exaggerated.
- Keith Carradine
My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.
- Willa Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
- Willa Cather
The resulting scrambling to get the next big shiver and shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid 70s, and more traditional bestsellers began to re-appear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.
- Stephen King
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
- Stephen King
It's as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, "Here you are. Try not to lose it." But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.
- Stephen King
Not stories told by wolf or man to frighten children, of Wolfbane and of werewolves, of grasht and goblins and of silly vampires, fables to frighten cowards with the threat of evil and of sin. But the power that lives beyond those stories, and makes them strong indeed, that lives in nightmares and in sleep. That is ribbed into the very fabric of conscious being. The power of love and hate.
- David Clement Davies
Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.
- Jonathan Coe
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
- J M Coetzee
On the red carpet, I saw all these great stories, and I also got to see the plastic surgery up close.
- Steven Cojocaru
And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.
- Joan Collins
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
- Francis Ford Coppola
You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems.
- Walt Disney Company
So in the middle of all the noise, I point to the sky. I hope he understands what I mean, because I mean so many things: My heart will always fly his name. I won't go gentle. I'll find a way to soar life the angels in the stories and I will find him.
- Ally Condie
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.
- Soren Kierkegaard
He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.
- John Connolly
But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
- Patricia Cornwell
All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.
- Harvey Cox
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
- Robert Creeley
There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship, and the sailor's dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies, and fill merchantmen, than all the pressgangs of Europe.
- Richard Henry Dana Jr
...I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave abominably, and with such abominable results. They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.
- Jeffery Deaver
Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.
- Tiffanie Debartolo
The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
- Barbara Deming
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
- John Green
My our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
- John Green
Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
- John Green
Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.
- John Green
All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.
- Sarah Dessen
I am busier now than I ever imagined I would be, but I feel blessed in that I have found what I am supposed to be doing with my life. It's wonderful to tell stories and have people listen to them.
- Kate Dicamillo
But Hadley understood. It wasn't that she was meant to read them all. Maybe someday she would, but for now, it was more the gesture itself. He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.
- Jennifer E Smith
He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.
- Jennifer E Smith
Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.
- Jennifer Donnelly
This is a bad story."
"Sorry. I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have told you."
"No, you should," I say.
"But"
"I don't want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
- Emma Donoghue
The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.
- Keith Donohue
I write short stories, and I wrote a play.
- Rita Dove
I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.
- Lena Dunham
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
- Helen Dunmore
It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! - Tropic of Cancer
- Henry Miller
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
- Umberto Eco
Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life... They could be mine, they might be yours.
- Sebastian Faulks
I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?
- Dorothea Benton Frank
Alright, all right," I said. "What if I tell you a story, instead?" Highlanders loved stories, and Jamie was no exception.
"Oh, aye, " he said, sounding much happier. "What sort of story is it?
- Diana Gabaldon
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.
- Neil Gaiman
What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?"
"Stories. And they give me hope.
- Neil Gaiman
Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.
- Neil Gaiman
Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.
- George R R Martin
All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.
- Leo Tolstoy
But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.
- Kaye Gibbons
You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.
- Kaye Gibbons
The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
- Kenneth Grahame
People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
- Alasdair Gray
We have the crime of the century every six months. So for people like me who enjoy, you know, taking these stories and writing about them, the material is endless.
- John Grisham
Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
- Lev Grossman
In some ways, I don't feel as if I had a choice. Looking back at my childhood, even before I could read and write, I was making up stories. I love reading and I love telling stories, and the times in my life when I've tried to ignore that part of me, I've gone a little crazy. Characters start tugging on my sleeves, words start haunting me, and I feel generally unsatisfied. Really, being a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.
- Shannon Hale
When I was involved with 'Star Wars,' I was very interested in all the backstories, and I used to pepper George with all kinds of questions about anything that crossed my mind, because I was very, very into it. But when the job came to an end, I had to move on.
- Mark Hamill
Marry Gentry Swallowing Darkness (Laurell K. Hamilton):Pick any fairy tale that's based on older stories, and the heroine of the piece has a miserable, dangerous, nightmarish time of it.
- Laurell K Hamilton
My tendency to make up stories and lie compulsively for the sake of my own amusement takes up a good portion of my day and provides me with a peace of mind not easily attainable in this economic climate.
- Chelsea Handler
I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.
- P J Harvey
I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.
- P J Harvey
Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures.. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate.
- Kathy Hepinstall
If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!
- Dave Hickey
He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.
- Leanna Renee Hieber
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
- Laura Hillenbrand
She had thought often of Ada's words about inventing new endings to stories and choosing joy over sorrow. In recent years she had decided her sister had been in part wrong. Suffering and death and loss were inescapable. And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.
- Eowyn Ivey
I try to just talk about human stories and what I think about religion or teapots or whatever.
- Eddie Izzard
I've written 2 books, 3 short stories, and a Non-fiction Relationship Checklist! All this while being a mother, wife, sister, daughter and a friend! I'm also a kick ass graphic artist and have designed book covers for some of Amazon's top selling authors!
- Junnita Jackson
The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.
- Bruce Jackson
We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what's been taken from us we all dream.
- N K Jemisin
So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what's been taken from us or what poison we've internalized or how hard we've had to work to expel it
we all get to dream.
- N K Jemisin
What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
- Denis Johnson
I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.
- Tommy Lee Jones
But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says.
- William Joyce
I've had a lot of very positive feedback about those stories, and seem to have struck upon something that most people feel. I can also tap dance, and don't know many other authors who can.
- Paul Kane
I love meeting new people and telling them about my stories and my projects that I am working on.
- Kim Kardashian
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.
- Casey Kasum
Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.
- Maynard James Keenan
Keep the corners of your mouth turned up. Speak in a low, persuasive tone. Listen; be teachable. Laugh at good stories and learn to tell them...For as long as you are green, you can grow.
- Mother Teresa
I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic, sexy, but classy, all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music, then the lyrical content starts to come - you know, the stories and things like that.
- R Kelly
Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.
- James Kelman
I always look for good stories and good characters, and if they're placed in a whodunit, then I'm interested.
- Joel Kinnaman
I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me..
- Markus Zusak
I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.
- Sally Kirkland
I invented the psychological histories and the relationship between Jack and Susan Stanton. I didn't know anything about the Clintons. I don't know more about the Clintons' marriage than you do.
- Joe Klein
For the next thirteen-plus hours, I stared out the window at the passing towns and countryside. All those lives. All those untold stories and private dramas. There was something so beautiful and sad about it. I felt weirdly emotional, like I was running away from home, but also running to a new home.
- Kate Klise
Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.
- Alethea Kontis
I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.
- Erik Larson
Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart
- Stephen R Lawhead
The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in...and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences..
- Alan Lee
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.
- Steven Levitan
Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediumsand if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.
- Charles De Lint
There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.
- Charles De Lint
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
- Jennifer Weiner
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.
- Eric Liu
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
- Barry Lopez
There wasn't much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.
- George Lucas
Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.
- George Macdonald
I really believe that our stories make us who we are. I don't think people are born as empty shells. They already have the makings of a personality and they have intelligence. But from the moment they're born and maybe before that they start accumulating stories and it's those stories that have the biggest effect on them.
- John Marsden
To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavor for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.
- Joyce Maynard
When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.
- Danica Mckellar
I am not sure how much Dudley will feature just because of the grand scale of the film and the fact that there are so many stories and characters to tie up. I haven't seen the film yet but I think it will be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but it was nice just to round it off and give it some closure.
- Harry Melling
...and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?
- Grace Metalious
We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.
- Donald Miller
I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well.
- Shigeru Miyamoto
I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.
- Alan Moore
I'm interested in stories and the dark side of peoples' minds.
- Ikue Mori
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
- Samantha Morton
Getting on stage is a bonus, that's my therapy, that's when I can tell stories and it all makes sense.
- Jason Mraz
Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.
- Carey Mulligan
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
- Alice Munro
Most politicians - those people who live, eat and breathe politics - like to sit around and talk about politics and tell political war stories. Reagan didn't do that. His war stories were movie war stories and Hollywood war stories. He loved that.
- Lyn Nofziger
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
- Michael Ondaatje
Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.
- Randy Pausch
The best leaders... almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.
- Tom Peters
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
- Annie Proulx
As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
- Daniel Radcliffe
I adored history, not the dry dates and boring battles, but the stories and the people who populated them.
- Deanna Raybourn
After Lock, Stock, all these really nasty small town characters came knocking at my door trying to tell me stories, and somehow I ended up with this guy whose brother was feeding people to pigs, and that's what he did to get rid of people.
- Guy Ritchie
It's difficult admitting you're wrong. Even more difficult admitting it when you have scoffed and otherwise ridiculed the truth with blind, unremitting determination, so blithely confident in your own infallibility. But then one day -- or one night -- the truth is put into your hands, and you realize those stories and songs and legends told by Northern strangers are truths after all, and that no one has lied to you.
- Jennifer Roberson
...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels.
- Marilynne Robinson
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
- Harold Ross
Oh her deathbed, when her hands could no longer weave or paint or mold clay, she'd told stories and filled them with the colors she loved.
- Veronica Rossi
I want to tell stories and make people feel good. That's when music is at its finest.
- Kelly Rowland
Our subconscious works in metaphors, stories, and word play. That's why a particular story or movie may mean more to some people than to others. Have you considered why you quest for this tale now?
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch
We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist ... it's having people remember who we are. We're terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on.
- Carrie Ryan
I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.
- Bob Schieffer
I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.
- Ed Smith
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
- Martin Cruz Smith
One thing I want to say: I don't like victim stories and I don't write them.
- Todd Solondz
I love sharing my stories and experiences with people and connecting to them on both a humorous and emotional level.
- Tori Spelling
I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. We try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced.
- Lesley Stahl
But no matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it. You have ot believe in love stories and prince charmings and happily ever after. That's why I write these songs. Because I think love is FEARLESS.
- Taylor Swift
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?
- Polly Toynbee
One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
- Scarlett Thomas
I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply there is a book.
- Scarlett Thomas
A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.
- Catherynne M Valente
As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.
- Tom Waits
I'd usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.
- Herschel Walker
And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we'd meet there again.
- Darnell Lamont Walker
Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.
- David Foster Wallace
I always wanted to tell stories and act.
- Eli Wallach
I love to tell stories and this is my way of getting them down on paper.
- Eli Wallach
When I was a child I devoured every book I could get my hands on. I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories - and my absolute favourite was 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.' Everything about it electrified me, and when I re-read Roald Dahl's books as an adult it surprised me.
- David Walliams
To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.
- Robert Walser
I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting.
- Jackie Weaver
I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.
- Rachel Weisz
Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn't a hot dog eating contest. You're not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there's a balance you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs.
- Chuck Wendig
We always see the innocent victims in the stories, and I am a little bored with that. I am much more interested in the price paid by the people who can fly.
- Bill Williams
You see the images that the public is demanding. Why more reality-based TV? You'd think that after the first Survivor it would have gone away, but it hasn't. The public demands it because they get all caught up in the personal stories, and want to see more and more.
- Montel Williams
I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
- Tennessee Williams
Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.
- Debra Winger
And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty. It's a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It's important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That's an early life-lesson from surfing.
- Tim Winton
I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come to know a God whose Son made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.
- Philip Yancey
Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.
- Jane Yolen
- Mark Twain
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
- J R R Tolkien
People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not."
"Shouldn't the storyteller believe it."
"The storyteller should tell it.
- Cecelia Ahern
It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
- Mitch Albom
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them.
They move on. They move away.
The moments that used to define them are covered by
moments of their own accomplishments.
It is not until much later, that
children understand;
their stories and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories
of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones,
beneath the water of their lives.
- Paulo Coelho
We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.
- Paulo Coelho
I didn't literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.
- Sherman Alexie
We writers are the worst kind of cruel,
Because we worship our own stories and poems,
And what human can compete with metaphors?
Writers stand still and yet vacate our homes
Inside our fantasies. We are word-whores,
With libidos and egos of balsa wood.
We'd have sex with our books, if only we could.
- Sherman Alexie
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
- Janet Evanovich
I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.
- Sergio Aragones
Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.
- Sergio Aragones
I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.
- Darren Aronofsky
I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.
- Jane Austen
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
- Dave Barry
I've produced and gotten to do a lot of optimistic love stories, and that was so where I was at for 10 years in my life. And now I feel like, Okay, now I know how to do that. I want to get scared again; I want to feel the way I felt when I started my company, when I started producing.
- Drew Barrymore
After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories-we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on.
- Allison Hoover Bartlett
When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
- Mario Batali
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
- Haruki Murakami
People come up to me and tell me how I changed their life and I've inspired them. And they tell me their stories, and that keeps me going.
- Valerie Bertinelli
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
- Jeff Bezos
The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.
- Judy Blume
With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.
- Don Bluth
I think the work that they do and the style of 3D graphics is absolutely fabulous and I think it's a great brush to use for some stories. And there are other brushes that I think are exclusive to a different kind of story.
- Don Bluth
Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
- Ray Bradbury
I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.
- Ray Bradbury
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?
- Lara Flynn Boyle
We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.
- Madeleine L Engle
When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance.
- David Brin
I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.
- Harold Brodkey
When I was a teenager, 'Playboy' was the most interesting magazine in the world, and not just for the playmates. I liked the interviews and the stories, and all that, but nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn't interest me.
- Chester Brown
As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.
- Dan Brown
Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children's bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.
- Louise Brown
I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.
- Bill Bryson
Sail the main course in a simple sturdy craft. Keep her well stocked with short stories and long laughs. Go fast enough to get there but slow enough to see. Moderation seems to be the key.
- Jimmy Buffett
There were other stories and other names. Second Base Stace, who had breasts in fourth grade and let some of the boys feel them. Vincent, who took acid and tried to flush a sofa down the toilet. Sheila, who allegedly masturbated with a hot dog and had to go to the emergency room. The list went on and on.
- Stephen Chbosky
Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
- Mark Burnett
I have always been drawn to coming-of-age stories and books and movies featuring compelling young characters.
- Emily Giffin
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
- Italo Calvino
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.... Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.
- Italo Calvino
There's a great argument about how many men he actually killed. People would tell stories and then as we all know as stories get told over and over again, they get embellished, facts get changed, elaborated upon, exaggerated.
- Keith Carradine
My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.
- Willa Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
- Willa Cather
The resulting scrambling to get the next big shiver and shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid 70s, and more traditional bestsellers began to re-appear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.
- Stephen King
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
- Stephen King
It's as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, "Here you are. Try not to lose it." But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.
- Stephen King
Not stories told by wolf or man to frighten children, of Wolfbane and of werewolves, of grasht and goblins and of silly vampires, fables to frighten cowards with the threat of evil and of sin. But the power that lives beyond those stories, and makes them strong indeed, that lives in nightmares and in sleep. That is ribbed into the very fabric of conscious being. The power of love and hate.
- David Clement Davies
Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.
- Jonathan Coe
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
- J M Coetzee
On the red carpet, I saw all these great stories, and I also got to see the plastic surgery up close.
- Steven Cojocaru
And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.
- Joan Collins
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
- Francis Ford Coppola
You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems.
- Walt Disney Company
So in the middle of all the noise, I point to the sky. I hope he understands what I mean, because I mean so many things: My heart will always fly his name. I won't go gentle. I'll find a way to soar life the angels in the stories and I will find him.
- Ally Condie
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.
- Soren Kierkegaard
He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.
- John Connolly
But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
- Patricia Cornwell
All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.
- Harvey Cox
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
- Robert Creeley
There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship, and the sailor's dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies, and fill merchantmen, than all the pressgangs of Europe.
- Richard Henry Dana Jr
...I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave abominably, and with such abominable results. They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.
- Jeffery Deaver
Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.
- Tiffanie Debartolo
The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
- Barbara Deming
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
- John Green
My our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
- John Green
Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
- John Green
Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.
- John Green
All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.
- Sarah Dessen
I am busier now than I ever imagined I would be, but I feel blessed in that I have found what I am supposed to be doing with my life. It's wonderful to tell stories and have people listen to them.
- Kate Dicamillo
But Hadley understood. It wasn't that she was meant to read them all. Maybe someday she would, but for now, it was more the gesture itself. He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.
- Jennifer E Smith
He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.
- Jennifer E Smith
Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.
- Jennifer Donnelly
This is a bad story."
"Sorry. I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have told you."
"No, you should," I say.
"But"
"I don't want there to be bad stories and me not know them.
- Emma Donoghue
The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.
- Keith Donohue
I write short stories, and I wrote a play.
- Rita Dove
I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.
- Lena Dunham
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
- Helen Dunmore
It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! - Tropic of Cancer
- Henry Miller
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
- Umberto Eco
Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life... They could be mine, they might be yours.
- Sebastian Faulks
I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?
- Dorothea Benton Frank
Alright, all right," I said. "What if I tell you a story, instead?" Highlanders loved stories, and Jamie was no exception.
"Oh, aye, " he said, sounding much happier. "What sort of story is it?
- Diana Gabaldon
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.
- Neil Gaiman
What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?"
"Stories. And they give me hope.
- Neil Gaiman
Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.
- Neil Gaiman
Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.
- George R R Martin
All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.
- Leo Tolstoy
But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.
- Kaye Gibbons
You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.
- Kaye Gibbons
The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
- Kenneth Grahame
People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
- Alasdair Gray
We have the crime of the century every six months. So for people like me who enjoy, you know, taking these stories and writing about them, the material is endless.
- John Grisham
Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.
- Lev Grossman
In some ways, I don't feel as if I had a choice. Looking back at my childhood, even before I could read and write, I was making up stories. I love reading and I love telling stories, and the times in my life when I've tried to ignore that part of me, I've gone a little crazy. Characters start tugging on my sleeves, words start haunting me, and I feel generally unsatisfied. Really, being a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.
- Shannon Hale
When I was involved with 'Star Wars,' I was very interested in all the backstories, and I used to pepper George with all kinds of questions about anything that crossed my mind, because I was very, very into it. But when the job came to an end, I had to move on.
- Mark Hamill
Marry Gentry Swallowing Darkness (Laurell K. Hamilton):Pick any fairy tale that's based on older stories, and the heroine of the piece has a miserable, dangerous, nightmarish time of it.
- Laurell K Hamilton
My tendency to make up stories and lie compulsively for the sake of my own amusement takes up a good portion of my day and provides me with a peace of mind not easily attainable in this economic climate.
- Chelsea Handler
I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.
- P J Harvey
I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.
- P J Harvey
Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures.. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate.
- Kathy Hepinstall
If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!
- Dave Hickey
He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.
- Leanna Renee Hieber
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
- Laura Hillenbrand
She had thought often of Ada's words about inventing new endings to stories and choosing joy over sorrow. In recent years she had decided her sister had been in part wrong. Suffering and death and loss were inescapable. And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.
- Eowyn Ivey
I try to just talk about human stories and what I think about religion or teapots or whatever.
- Eddie Izzard
I've written 2 books, 3 short stories, and a Non-fiction Relationship Checklist! All this while being a mother, wife, sister, daughter and a friend! I'm also a kick ass graphic artist and have designed book covers for some of Amazon's top selling authors!
- Junnita Jackson
The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.
- Bruce Jackson
We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what's been taken from us we all dream.
- N K Jemisin
So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what's been taken from us or what poison we've internalized or how hard we've had to work to expel it
we all get to dream.
- N K Jemisin
What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
- Denis Johnson
I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.
- Tommy Lee Jones
But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says.
- William Joyce
I've had a lot of very positive feedback about those stories, and seem to have struck upon something that most people feel. I can also tap dance, and don't know many other authors who can.
- Paul Kane
I love meeting new people and telling them about my stories and my projects that I am working on.
- Kim Kardashian
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.
- Casey Kasum
Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.
- Maynard James Keenan
Keep the corners of your mouth turned up. Speak in a low, persuasive tone. Listen; be teachable. Laugh at good stories and learn to tell them...For as long as you are green, you can grow.
- Mother Teresa
I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic, sexy, but classy, all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music, then the lyrical content starts to come - you know, the stories and things like that.
- R Kelly
Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.
- James Kelman
I always look for good stories and good characters, and if they're placed in a whodunit, then I'm interested.
- Joel Kinnaman
I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me..
- Markus Zusak
I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.
- Sally Kirkland
I invented the psychological histories and the relationship between Jack and Susan Stanton. I didn't know anything about the Clintons. I don't know more about the Clintons' marriage than you do.
- Joe Klein
For the next thirteen-plus hours, I stared out the window at the passing towns and countryside. All those lives. All those untold stories and private dramas. There was something so beautiful and sad about it. I felt weirdly emotional, like I was running away from home, but also running to a new home.
- Kate Klise
Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.
- Alethea Kontis
I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.
- Erik Larson
Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart
- Stephen R Lawhead
The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in...and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences..
- Alan Lee
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.
- Steven Levitan
Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediumsand if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.
- Charles De Lint
There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.
- Charles De Lint
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
- Jennifer Weiner
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.
- Eric Liu
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
- Barry Lopez
There wasn't much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.
- George Lucas
Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.
- George Macdonald
I really believe that our stories make us who we are. I don't think people are born as empty shells. They already have the makings of a personality and they have intelligence. But from the moment they're born and maybe before that they start accumulating stories and it's those stories that have the biggest effect on them.
- John Marsden
To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavor for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.
- Joyce Maynard
When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.
- Danica Mckellar
I am not sure how much Dudley will feature just because of the grand scale of the film and the fact that there are so many stories and characters to tie up. I haven't seen the film yet but I think it will be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but it was nice just to round it off and give it some closure.
- Harry Melling
...and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?
- Grace Metalious
We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.
- Donald Miller
I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well.
- Shigeru Miyamoto
I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.
- Alan Moore
I'm interested in stories and the dark side of peoples' minds.
- Ikue Mori
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
- Samantha Morton
Getting on stage is a bonus, that's my therapy, that's when I can tell stories and it all makes sense.
- Jason Mraz
Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.
- Carey Mulligan
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
- Alice Munro
Most politicians - those people who live, eat and breathe politics - like to sit around and talk about politics and tell political war stories. Reagan didn't do that. His war stories were movie war stories and Hollywood war stories. He loved that.
- Lyn Nofziger
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
- Michael Ondaatje
Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.
- Randy Pausch
The best leaders... almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.
- Tom Peters
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
- Annie Proulx
As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
- Daniel Radcliffe
I adored history, not the dry dates and boring battles, but the stories and the people who populated them.
- Deanna Raybourn
After Lock, Stock, all these really nasty small town characters came knocking at my door trying to tell me stories, and somehow I ended up with this guy whose brother was feeding people to pigs, and that's what he did to get rid of people.
- Guy Ritchie
It's difficult admitting you're wrong. Even more difficult admitting it when you have scoffed and otherwise ridiculed the truth with blind, unremitting determination, so blithely confident in your own infallibility. But then one day -- or one night -- the truth is put into your hands, and you realize those stories and songs and legends told by Northern strangers are truths after all, and that no one has lied to you.
- Jennifer Roberson
...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels.
- Marilynne Robinson
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
- Harold Ross
Oh her deathbed, when her hands could no longer weave or paint or mold clay, she'd told stories and filled them with the colors she loved.
- Veronica Rossi
I want to tell stories and make people feel good. That's when music is at its finest.
- Kelly Rowland
Our subconscious works in metaphors, stories, and word play. That's why a particular story or movie may mean more to some people than to others. Have you considered why you quest for this tale now?
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch
We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist ... it's having people remember who we are. We're terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on.
- Carrie Ryan
I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.
- Bob Schieffer
I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.
- Ed Smith
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
- Martin Cruz Smith
One thing I want to say: I don't like victim stories and I don't write them.
- Todd Solondz
I love sharing my stories and experiences with people and connecting to them on both a humorous and emotional level.
- Tori Spelling
I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. We try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced.
- Lesley Stahl
But no matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it. You have ot believe in love stories and prince charmings and happily ever after. That's why I write these songs. Because I think love is FEARLESS.
- Taylor Swift
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?
- Polly Toynbee
One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
- Scarlett Thomas
I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply there is a book.
- Scarlett Thomas
A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.
- Catherynne M Valente
As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.
- Tom Waits
I'd usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.
- Herschel Walker
And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we'd meet there again.
- Darnell Lamont Walker
Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.
- David Foster Wallace
I always wanted to tell stories and act.
- Eli Wallach
I love to tell stories and this is my way of getting them down on paper.
- Eli Wallach
When I was a child I devoured every book I could get my hands on. I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories - and my absolute favourite was 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.' Everything about it electrified me, and when I re-read Roald Dahl's books as an adult it surprised me.
- David Walliams
To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.
- Robert Walser
I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting.
- Jackie Weaver
I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.
- Rachel Weisz
Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn't a hot dog eating contest. You're not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there's a balance you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs.
- Chuck Wendig
We always see the innocent victims in the stories, and I am a little bored with that. I am much more interested in the price paid by the people who can fly.
- Bill Williams
You see the images that the public is demanding. Why more reality-based TV? You'd think that after the first Survivor it would have gone away, but it hasn't. The public demands it because they get all caught up in the personal stories, and want to see more and more.
- Montel Williams
I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
- Tennessee Williams
Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.
- Debra Winger
And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty. It's a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It's important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That's an early life-lesson from surfing.
- Tim Winton
I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come to know a God whose Son made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.
- Philip Yancey
Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.
- Jane Yolen
Comments
Post a Comment