A Story Of Quotes

#1. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

Italo Calvino

#2. I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.

William Monahan

#3. It was suggested that I take a recording test. I passed, was liked and, well, you know the rest of the story.

Johnny Kidd

#4. A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.

Chuck Klosterman

#5. Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.

George Saunders

#6. I understand some of the people's impatience with the show last year. I think that Lisa's (Lili Taylor) story line (marrying Nate with minimal motivation in season three) became a little bit of a diversion - and that happens. It happens in every show.

Chris Albrecht

#7. I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.

Chip Kidd

#8. The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Arthur Miller

#9. So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice.

John Eldredge

#10. It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to be reading that afternoon: a story where, no matter how bad things got, you knew everything was going to turn out fine in the end.

Heather James

#11. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.

Steven Johnson

#12. We busted a lot of family secrets with this. But to make a long story short, my parents relationship was built heavily on security issues for my Mom, and when my Dad couldn't provide security, the relationship unraveled.

Kenny Loggins

#13. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#14. Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

Sharon Salzberg

#15. I know I haven't said a lot of things I'm quoted as saying in the papers. It makes me wonder why I brought up the recovery story in the first place.

Mary Docter

#16. I always plan the whole story in some detail, long before I start writing the actual thing. But even doing that, I find that there is plenty of room for spontaneity. Often the characters will lead the story off in a direction I hadn't originally intended!

Raymond Buckland

#17. The story of practically every great fortune starts with the day when a creator of ideas and a seller of ideas got together and worked in harmony.

Napoleon Hill

#18. Your dad's story is over. In six months or a year, this will be done for him. He won't be dealing with the consequences of what you choose to do now. You will. So you make this decision based on what you need.

Jason Schmidt

#19. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

Arthur Machen

#20. What the hell did people have to keep them occupied on a damp and windy day in January apart from sitting indoors and lapping up the story of somebody who had suffered even more than they were doing.

Hakan Nesser

#21. It's basically taking a 911 call, bringing them on stage and dealing with it just like when I was a Chicago policeman for 12 years. I personally become involved. Where Jerry lets people tell their story and lets everything happen on stage, I kind of go after the bad guy and protect the little guy.

Steve Wilkos

#22. This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.

Ann Hood

#23. The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it ... some stories just don't have a happy ending.

Jodi Picoult

#24. To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

George Saunders

#25. What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.

Tom Robbins

#26. God seeks to influence humanity. This is at the heart of the Christmas story. It is the story of light coming into the darkness, of a Savior to show us the way, of light overcoming the darkness, of God's work to save the world.

Adam Hamilton

#27. 'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.

G. Willow Wilson

#28. Right now I just want to play good roles, and if the role happens to be a gay man, that's not of any import other than, 'Is it a good story? Does it say something that's interesting?'

Chris Pine

#29. When I'm documenting, for example, a story on women in Afghanistan, I will do a huge amount of research and a lot of time on the ground just getting to know the women before I even start shooting.

Lynsey Addario

#30. Part of the beauty of a long-format story is that the characters become as much yours as they are mine, and you dream of them in a different way than I do.

Joshua Jackson

#31. Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.

Katherine Anne Porter

#32. I tend to write songs that are about something pretty specific. A lot of them tell some kind of little made-up story.

Adam Schlesinger

#33. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

Adam Ross

#34. Whatever I experienced in the world that I didn't understand I'd invent a story and workout my understanding of something through the story.

Lisa Alther

#35. Going slowly [ ... ] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

Paul Theroux

#36. A love story is not the same as a romance novel. A romance novel is the story of two people falling in love against their will. This is a story of two people who leave each other against their will. It starts to end the minute they meet.

Tiffany Reisz

#37. The first time you see the film it takes you right back to those times and those moments. It's very difficult to be objective about the work because you really have to remove yourself and see it a couple of times before you can really involve yourself in the story.

Djimon Hounsou

#38. I really feel that my life story is a continuation of the Great American Dream - the immigrant who comes to this country and is allowed to excel. How many other countries would let me do that?

Friedrich St. Florian

#39. It should never be your job to pick up the pieces of a broken man or to housebreak one. There are far better things you can do with your time.

Alice Walsh

#40. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.
(Hari Kunzru)

Carolina De Robertis

#41. I like any story that starts one place and really takes a huge journey to a whole new place; that people in their life want to take that journey. They want to be able to find things in their life that aren't working and work through them to a new place of change.

Amy Smart

#42. Courage, kindness and a great determination to succeed in life with a smile were hallmarks of my wonderful wife. And why her story deserves to be told.

Paul Roberts

#43. I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.

Wendell Berry

#44. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.

Joyce Carol Oates

#45. Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy.

Sharon Salzberg

#46. The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it's not the most dramatic story about the West.

David Roberts

#47. We can have all the food and water we need, but without the sustenance of
real story, real art - without the wisdom, insight, and "life instruction" it brings - we will stagnate as a culture and become a swamp where quality life can no longer be sustained. So share your gifts! Share your art!

Derek Rydall

#48. When people hear the name 'Marco Polo,' they tend to think of a map or explorer. Very few people know the true story of Marco Polo, and it's so much more compelling and exciting than the mythology.

John Fusco

#49. It has been said by many that a true love story has no happy ending simply because the truest of loves never ends. It is immortal. This is the kind of love that lives forever in your heart as a feeling you will always feel, a place you can always return to.

Michele L. Rivera

#50. It's a season of life, if your granted peace, freedom and you got the right person to love.

Auliq Ice

#51. I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.

Molly Antopol

#52. You will never get the truth out of a Narcissist. The closest you will ever come is a story that either makes them the victim or the hero, but never the villain.

Shannon L. Alder

#53. Everyone had a story he believed was worthy of a best-seller; for me, reality was rarely interesting enough to take the place of fiction.

Ben Mezrich

#54. A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success;

Daniel Kahneman

#55. The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.

John Rhys-Davies

#56. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.

Tommy Greenwald

#57. To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story.

Noah Feldman

#58. So now live for real, Craig. Live. Live. Live. Live.

Ned Vizzini

#59. What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

Alasdair MacIntyre

#60. About their wedding on a beach of Nantucket, after nearly 50 years together as a couple: "After years of being who we truly were only in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending." - Norman Sunshine, co-author, Double Life

Norman Sunshine

#61. This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think.

Neil Gaiman

#62. I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.

Patrick Ness

#63. What was that old story about how women had a better chance of being abducted by aliens than they did getting married after forty?

Dorothea Benton Frank

#64. Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn't come easy to everybody. It's a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

Austin Kleon

#65. I'm aware of 'Twilight,' but I've never seen the movies or read any of the books. Frankly, the story leaves me cold - why do a vampire story about abstinence?

Alan Ball

#66. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#67. 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.

William H Gass

#68. I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

Craig Venter

#69. As an actor, I'm attracted to drama; as a director, it's humor - because it's the story of my life, and I can't be that serious about it. Being alone is a big theme in all my movies, both as a director and as an actress.

Jodie Foster

#70. I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.

Mark Billingham

#71. You see so many movies ... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

Peter Bogdanovich

#72. This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called 'Gurgeh'. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game. Me? I'll tell you about me later. This is how the story begins.

Anonymous

#73. Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Barbara Tuchman

#74. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

David Byrne

#75. I am a big proponent of being in touch with everyone even when I do not have a story to ask about.

Kara Swisher

#76. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.

Patrick Rothfuss

#77. It's hard to conceive of someone who could work for at least a few hours each day for months and years on the same story without it being close enough to their life experience to fuel their commitment.

Rafael Yglesias

#78. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.

Judi Dench

#79. One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

Nora Roberts

#80. If you get into a game of talking to the media, you keep the story alive. Information is oxygen. Without it they die.

Michael Connelly

#81. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

George Stephen

#82. I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Walter Kirn

#83. I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#84. I have a very healthy dose of self-loathing. But I think we all have a past of being whatever our story was, of feeling not good enough. It can propel you to work harder and do more, but it can also be a tremendous trap, and you can't see beyond it.

Kim Cattrall

#85. We are all an unforgettable artwork and a story yet to be told.

Steven Cuoco

#86. I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

David Levithan

#87. If you create a good story that has a lot of story value ... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

Robert Rodriguez

#88. Mistruths are printed as fact, in some cases, and frequently only half of a story will be told.

Michael J. Jackson

#89. Listening to him tell the story now, it was clear to Adam that Glendower was more than a historical figure to Gansey. He was everything Gansey wished he could be: wise and brave, sure of his path, touched by the supernatural, respected by all, survived by his legacy.

Maggie Stiefvater

#90. And now dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:
Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.

Mary Howitt

#91. "Oscillate Wildly" is in many ways a story of first love and how it challenges our hero's guarded sense of what's possible.

Travis Mathews

#92. Anyone who says things like "Happy Ever After" as though that end to a love story is a given, is cooking up a right stinking cauldron of shite and trying to serve it as soup.

Amy Lane

#93. Create a story of WOW that will be retold.

Jeffrey Gitomer

#94. One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.

Noam Chomsky

#95. Mum just laughed gleefully at his mounting frustration, like the villainous matriarch in a Roald Dahl story. I suspect a TV guide would describe her idea of comedy as 'dark', or, at very best, 'alternative'.

Matthew Crow

#96. I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

Louis Sachar

#97. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

Haile Gerima

#98. People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice ... they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

Anthony Bourdain

#99. If you start to see more successful businesses that are playing on a global level, the story of Africa will begin to change

Tara Fela-Durotoye

#100. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Tim O'Brien