Stories Quotes - Page 210

[My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

Sometimes strange and wonderful things will pop into my head. And sometimes I will see something in the world that is the beginning of a story. I always have a notebook with me so that I can write down what I see and hear.

The origin of each story is unique.

In my stories for children, I sometimes show a hard, harsh, dangerous world. I'm going to show you the way it is, but I'm going to also tell you that there's every reason to hope.

I read my books out loud to myself because of the demands of the story and demands of language.

I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.

When I journal, I write about images that I've seen that I think might make good stories. I write about things that I hear that I think I can turn into a story. I write about the story that I'm working on and where I think it might go.

We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.

There are so many difficult things and stories can make them palatable. That's the way I have always felt.

And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.

The love story for me was the nature of the love and not the age of the lovers.

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

A lot of the ancient Norse myths and legends are the basis of a lot of the sci-fi, fantasy films out there. Telling these stories in a contemporary medium, it's all good.

This is the problem with over-crowded inner-city schools there aren't enough parts for everyone in the nativity story.

I make such big efforts to forget things and I can't tell the story of my life because, thank God, I'm still living it.

In fact, I don't even know myself. That is the big secret of the story. That there is no story.

I have a degree in cinema studies and the big paper I wrote at the end of that was about Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. So I thought that I knew quite a bit about Judy Garland, but I read in passing that the Stonewall riots were a reaction to her death and I had never really read enough to know what that meant or how that could be true. I was interested in that I knew so much about Judy Garland, but I really didn't know this story.

One of the reasons why I failed was because I figured out in the research process that I couldn't tell it as just, "This is what Frances Farmer's life was like." There are so many questions as to what her life was like because of the way her story has been seized upon and exploited by different factions.

You read these stories of people who were in Hollywood in the late '60s. After they found out about the murders, everybody was like, "Have you met [Charles] Manson? Have you been to that ranch?" In some way, everybody felt connected, but what was it like for people who really were connected.

What I do with the story itself varies of course, but what I want to do is to present the world so that the reader can access it without tripping over the details.

If you want the reader to accept the premise as a given, then being specific is vital. This is what I'm after; I want the reader to accept the setting and the mindset of the characters, so we can get on with the story.