Stories Quotes - Page 134

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child.

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.

I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.

But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.

The truth is, if you're around long enough, you have a story about everyone. But it's best to keep your mouth shut sometimes.

The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes.

Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere.

You see, Mademoiselle, I have experience, I know the world. To pass the time, why don't you ask every passenger to tell you his life's story? And if there is a single one among them who has never cursed his life, who has not often told himself that he was the unhappiest of men, then you may throw me overboard, headfirst!

For me, acting was a way of releasing all of this stuff that I had inside - and a way for me to tell the stories of the people I knew, so that their spirit could live through me.

Your favorite story, whatever it might be, was written for one reader

I'll tell you a secret. Old storytellers never die. They disappear into their own story.

The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.

Time for the likeliest story since Mary told Joseph it was God’s.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.