Stories Quotes - Page 102

Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

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

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and Im enjoying it.

Yes, of course my father harmed and caused a lot of damage but both stories are true. He did things to help and destroy Colombia, both are true.

I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.

And now, without having wearied my friends, I hope, with detailed scientific accounts, theories, or deductions, I will only say that I have endeavoured to tell just the story of the adventure itself.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.

There is nobody so weak of invention that cannot make some little stories to villify his enemy.

all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

The story of the Republican Party is of a far-right that has moved from the fringes of the party to a complete domination of the party. The moderate, mainstream and pragmatic leaders of the party have been pushed out or died off.

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.

The strength of a story is the truth you find in it.

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

War is, after all, the universal perversion ... war stories, the pornography of war.

Pablo Escobar is one of the great stories of all time. It's a bizarre, dark version of success.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

I wanted to, you know, get my story out in the world, which, it turns out, is a very misguided notion.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.