Stories Quotes - Page 231

I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

What happened in the interim is, billions of records have been digitized. Historians and scholars have always used genealogical records to tell the story of American history. It takes months and years of research. I can't even tell you how laborious that is. You have to be somebody who has a lot of free time, like a professor who can take tenure or someone with a great deal of leisure.

My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing.

In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story.

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .

My way of telling stories is kind of what I do naturally. It's no different from how I would talk to you if you were in my living room.

There is a story that you have to tell within a certain amount of time, and you can only show so much of the character. So as much as the script is born from the source material, there are certain limitations.

If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.

There's only one story, the story of your life.

I actually have a life I said I wanted to have. I wanted to tell stories I want and be with my family. I'm whispering it, because I'm a quarter Jewish and afraid it's all going to be taken away.

For me, writing Bridget's [Jones] stories is an instinctive, organic thing, which tends to happen more by accident than design.

We are creatures of story.

If there’s no one else to tell another side - the only story that can be told is the story that becomes true. (p. 173)

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.

When my stories were translated into other languages and received good reviews in the international press and won prizes, some Arab festivals and newspapers began to take an interest in what I had produced. This sudden Arab interest is a form of hypocrisy and nonsense.

My stories were translated and had many reviews before I had an interview with any international or Arab newspaper. If the stories hadn't succeeded, you wouldn't have asked me my position on Arab festivals and I wouldn't have been interested in the festivals anyway, because I would be in seclusion, writing.

Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, I'm not afraid to deal with themes about the ups and downs of life, yet which are still entertaining, and you still feel these stories.

He brought imagination to the story of the Creation.