Top 100 Making Stories Quotes
#1. You can't just say what's going to happen ahead of time. That's not how physical law works. That's narrative. And when reality is twisted to fit narrative, that's not natural. That's someone making stories happen.
Ryan North
#2. I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#3. I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.
Haylie Duff
#4. We understand ourselves through stories, by making stories out of our lives. Storytellers give people structure with which they can begin to look at their own lives and try to make sense of them.
Bill Harley
#5. As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"
Ellen Glasgow
#6. Tell me a legend," he said out of nowhere, and he realised they were making stories of each other, or themselves.
Matthew Salesses
#8. 'Planet Earth' was such an extraordinary series and the 'Making Of' ... is fascinating: the creatures and stories behind the camera are just as fascinating as those in front. It's a bit of a dream come true to be a part of the team in some small way.
Dan Stevens
#9. What is crucial is the provision of opportunities for telling all the diverse stories, for interpreting membership as well as ethnicity, for making inescapable the braids of experience woven into the fabric of America's plurality.
Maxine Greene
#10. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Bernard Cornwell
#11. So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.
Todd Solondz
#12. The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#13. Given that I don't know anything, when I am making up stories about the future, why not make it a good story instead of a scary one?
Sharon Weil
#14. The most powerful decision-making part of the audience is women. Boys have a lot of impact on the industry, but it's often women who impact what stories get made.
Nina Jacobson
#15. Hollywood used to be run by artists and people who loved artists ... people who wanted to make movies for all the right reasons. For the love. The Art. To tell stories. Yes to make money as well, but it was about both. Now I feel, it's mostly about bottom line and making money.
Matthew Lillard
#16. My grandchildren will be making money from the stories I write and sell as eBooks because they will continue to be making money.
J.A. Konrath
#17. I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that.
Dan Alatorre
#18. When you just get fantasy stories that are about fairies or goblins, I just don't care. I'm never going to meet a goblin, it doesn't mean anything to me. So my definition of fantasy is very broad, it's anything to do with memory, or dreams, or ways of interpreting or making sense of the world.
Dave McKean
#19. [My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.
Kate Seredy
#20. This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
#21. If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.
James M. Cain
#22. I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell.
Kim Ji-woon
#23. This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.
John Irving
#24. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
Stephen Graham Jones
#25. I don't keep an ongoing dribble of updates of my day, but I tell little compartmentalized stories every day on Snapchat. I use it much more like making a movie than maintaining a diary. When people watch my 60-second clips, there's a beginning, middle, and end.
Casey Neistat
#26. Art consists precisely in making us admire old stories, charming us with them eternally, as Nature charms with her eternal sun, her ancient earth, and her men built all on the same pattern, and all animated by the same feelings ...
Marie Bashkirtseff
#27. I love telling stories, telling jokes, making people laugh. I've got no plans to stop doing it.
David Alan Basche
#28. Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way.
Jay-Z
#29. Romance novels feature nuanced portrayals of female characters having adventures, making choices, and accepting themselves just as they are. When we say these stories are silly and unrealistic, we are telling young girls not to expect to be the heroines in their own real lives.
Maya Rodale
#30. Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.
Erri De Luca
#31. Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.
Martha Beck
#32. Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.
Adam Savage
#33. As I walk back to the school on my own, I realise I'm crying. So I go back to the stories I've read about the five and I try to make sense of their lives because in making sense of theirs, I may understand mine.
Melina Marchetta
#34. My basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.
Stephen King
#35. I think they find it - they find me quite confusing, because - they know the music, but they don't know anything about me ... because I keep a very private lifestyle so they end up ... making up stories as such. But I don't really concern myself too much about them.
Enya
#36. I was an athlete growing up and I miss that. I miss hanging out with dudes and making raunchy jokes and telling stories, trading details, you know? There's something I really miss about that.
Chris Pratt
#37. I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
Nick Earls
#38. Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.
Scott Westerfeld
#39. Every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?
Elizabeth Bowen
#40. You spend so much to buy these media net stories or full page ads to build perception ... you can rather save this money and put it in the making or marketing of the film.
Kangana Ranaut
#41. The technology certainly changes. I think, in terms of making films, that's been the biggest change. But many things stay the same. I mean, there's still stories to be told. There are scripts that give you a good guide and insight into the film.
Howard Shore
#42. I am not an actor. Yes, every so often I appear on talk shows to promote something I've written, and I enjoy doing so because I have a lot of stories to tell, and I like making audiences laugh. But that's not acting. That's just me being me.
Alan Zweibel
#43. I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same.
Rick Riordan
#44. I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.
Meg Cabot
#45. Being an author isn't just about making money or hitting the Amazon Bestsellers list, it's about the positive impact you and your stories make in peoples lives. Even if it's just one person.
Shannon Eckrich
#46. Sometimes I'm considered, I guess, a subtle actor. Maybe I'm less of a showman and more just trying to tell the story. I don't know what the perception is. I just want to tell the story so the story as a whole works as opposed to just making sure that I work.
Kelli O'Hara
#47. I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.
Kerry Greenwood
#48. I always wanted my kids to like me and think I was funny, so I made up this story about a kid named Jake and his racecar that he had built from scratch, fully loaded with whatever fantastical gadget he or I wanted him to have at the moment. I loved making up the stories off the top of my head.
Rhea Perlman
#49. I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do.
Dido Armstrong
#50. I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.
Hooman Majd
#51. Steve Jobs had something like a 90% approval rating from his employees. You hear stories about him being this short-tempered, aggressive person, which he was. But he was in the pursuit of making people around him better, so the product they created would be better.
Ashton Kutcher
#52. He had seen - clever, clever boy that he was - that she could not be won by wooing; and he had approached her sidelong, as a friend rather than a lover, meeting her in the woods and telling her stories and making her love him without her noticing.
Ken Follett
#53. Food is about making an interaction with ingredients. If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.
Jose Andres
#54. Acting and making art is just something I love to do, and I love to tell stories that feel important, honest and necessary.
Zoe Kravitz
#55. My life is making movies. I like storytelling, and I've got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up.
George Lucas
#56. I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
Peter Ackroyd
#57. The past doesn't exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren't changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future.
Martha Beck
#58. I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.
Edward Hirsch
#60. Fuck your honour, Kaisheen. You are the smartest man I know, yet you had me travel three days during winter to have my counsel. Are you making a move on the Emperor? If you are, you'll have my full support and the backing of the Monasteries.
Paul W.S. Bowler
#61. Every story was being made up. My true friends weren't the ones speaking. It was people who never knew me, making up stories. Even my local paper put a $1,000 bounty out for information about my whereabouts.
Marla Maples
#62. As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author.
Victoria Hanley
#63. When the world falls asleep, authors weave the stories that are called dreams.. and when authors dare to jot down.. that's called making dreams come true.
Vikrmn
#64. I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories.
T.C. Boyle
#65. I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.
George R R Martin
#66. You always read stories of people going out to California and making it as an actor with, like, two dollars, so I figured I'd try it.
Adam Driver
#67. I've always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along.
Ann Leckie
#68. Film 'This Changes Everything' is not a sad story. It's not a slit-your-wrists climate film. It's a story about people who are making change happen.
Avi Lewis
#69. Looking back, I realize my favorite stories weren't in books, they were in comics. On top of being a history enthusiast, my father was also a comics fan, and he kept his stash in the top drawer of his dresser, in easy reach of a kid making a beeline to the bathroom.
Jeff Kinney
#70. Every character I've had in my act - none of them have a similar creation story. I actually thought up Peanut and designed him in my head. I described him to a woman that was making soft puppets and she drew up some sketches. And the character came to be just because he popped into my head.
Jeff Dunham
#71. He had no intention of actually kissing her. Knowing Jenny, she probably put on arsenic tainted lipstick every morning. But she'd been the one making up reprobate stories about him for weeks and throwing herself at him all evening.
Anne Garboczi Evans
#72. My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.
Paula Hawkins
#73. It's a great wake-up call for our entire industry: What movies are we making? What storytellers are we allowing to tell the stories? What people are we allowing to be cast in those stories? I think we need newer stories, and more people given the opportunity to do anything they want.
John Krasinski
#74. Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
Leslie Charteris
#75. Want to get your kids to read more? Try making books easily accessible. Put them where kids can easily reach and don't make them off limits. (within reason)
Melanie Kirk
#76. I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die sharing my stories and laughing with you and until then, I'll run around this world ... Confessing my stories and making everyone else, confess their's to me.
Jose N. Harris
#77. Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself - of poems and stories and essays - delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.
Michael Dirda
#78. I don't know who explained this rule to me; maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn't understand, and I understood almost nothing.
Cesar Aira
#79. The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.
Brene Brown
#80. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues.
Vladimir Nabokov
#81. I toyed with making portraits based on people's discarded shopping lists found on the street, or old diaries bought on eBay, or other forms of borrowed stories. When I stumbled across the Missed Connections listings, I knew immediately I'd found it.
Sophie Blackall
#82. There is no way that you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true.
Madeleine L'Engle
#83. I have never seen a film being as influenced by the incidents during its making as Highway. The adventures of our north Indian road journey has many stories to tell
Imtiaz Ali
#84. Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.
George Eliot
#85. I have been a Christian all my life, but it's impossible to be so deeply involved in these stories without it making you think again, and without it making you consciously aware of the people involved.
Della Reese
#86. People started saying I was ignoring my country, making up stories about me. Ludicrous things, like that I throw tea on my assistants.
Joss Stone
#87. I've always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending.
Ruth Glick
#88. I hope telling stories though 'Making a Difference' - as in my academic work and nonprofit work - will help me to live my grandmother's adage of 'Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you.'
Chelsea Clinton
#89. I've been acting since second grade, telling stories, making my parents laugh here and there, so I'm hoping my 'thing' is acting. But I also make a really good bread pudding.
Anna Camp
#90. I'm a 50-year-old guy making music for over 20 years. I've been writing songs since I was 20, so it's really been 30 years, and it's always been personal, but I've always told stories.
Art Alexakis
#91. How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
Alice Munro
#92. Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago.
Catherynne M Valente
#93. A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories ... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.
Aaron Huey
#94. You know what's it's changed is my appreciate for the art form of making cinema. I don't want to act as much as I want to tell stories. I want to be a part of the whole collective and pull all of the pieces together. That's what I love about directing.
Jason Momoa
#95. I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.
Nicholas Royle
#96. What's gratifying for me and interesting is that people are picking up on exactly what I want them to, which is that this is energizing people, and making them want to make stories.
Jessica Abel
#97. Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.
Donald E. Westlake
#98. What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he - or better yet, *she* - watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look.
-Leah said - to Nadine, although she was looking at Marjorie (pg 138)
Dean Hughes
#99. God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
Tom Wolfe
#100. One of the fun things about play is making up stories ...
John Lasseter
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