Top 100 Quotes About People's Stories
#1. But that's what we all are-just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away.
Charles De Lint
#2. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Tobias Wolff
#3. I like stories where people have to face some big demons internally. It always seems to be an element of horror, because it's pretty scary to have to face yourself and the things you're most worried about: your own abilities and your own capabilities and your own level of competence in being a hero.
Scott Snyder
#4. It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?
Robin Epstein
#5. The existence of the Taliban, in my view, is a tragedy for Afghanistan. We as Americans need to understand our role in helping bring that tragedy about. So I think it's important to look at the stories about why these people are fighting.
Anand Gopal
#6. Study people's success stories hard. Study their failures even harder.
Sylvester Stallone
#7. People sing each other's songs and they cultivate standards. That's the reason why we have folk music and folk stories. History is told through song.
Brandi Carlile
#8. There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place.
J.K. Rowling
#9. This human condition and people's stories. That's what I love. The other thing is traveling.
Fisher Stevens
#10. I'm a conduit for telling people's stories. It's a privilege.
Tori Amos
#11. I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
Simon Van Booy
#12. It's stories that inspire people to change. It's stories that make them believe things can be better.
Sebastien De Castell
#13. We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist ... it's having people remember who we are. We're terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on.
Carrie Ryan
#14. People love to be told stories, but it's the sugar that draws you into the theater.
Craig Bierko
#15. Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.
Zack Snyder
#16. It's the big question of every TV show, right, where you have these two people who it's clear the world wants to put them together and everyone wants to see them together, but also when you're telling these stories you can't throw these people together immediately.
Patrick J. Adams
#17. If somebody accuses you in a story of being a crook, you can demand that they prove it. But if a comic says it and you protest, people say, 'What's the matter, you can't take a joke?
Robert Orben
#18. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.
Flemming Rose
#19. The funny thing is, whenever I'm working on something, I kind of forget there's a lot of people watching. It makes it easier to be in the moment and to tell a story as well as possible.
Michiel Huisman
#20. The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.
Kurt Busiek
#21. Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.
Soledad O'Brien
#22. The thought was sobering. How many people's motives didn't match up with what I'd taken for their actions? How many villains were the heroes of their own stories? I didn't know, and I was terribly afraid that I was never going to find out.
Mira Grant
#23. Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people's stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.
Roland Barthes
#24. 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
#25. Many people think of the Bible as a book of moral teachings with stories sprinkled through to illustrate the teachings. But it's a lot BETTER THAN THAT ... the Bible is a single true story with teachings sprinkled through to illustrate the story.
Timothy Keller
#26. I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of "reservoir," albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.
Haruki Murakami
#27. As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates.
Jenny Downham
#28. Films really can change a conversation and change someone's thinking and perception, especially with people of color at the center. It rarely happens. I think it's important for both the community but also the world to see people of color in all genres, especially love stories.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#29. I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that.
Harlan Coben
#30. I think people are really starting to rebel against that. And I think there's going to be more and more gray areas. Hopefully that means we'll see more stories with characters that could be interchangeable with men.
Evan Rachel Wood
#31. When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.
Sarah Kay
#32. No matter what happens, the world can be pretty ridiculous and people be pretty ridiculous, but how would you react? That's an easy filter to put any story through.
Steve Dildarian
#33. I'm always touched by people's different stories of who they are and why they made the choices that they made. I feel so empowered by the story behind the person.
Tracee Ellis Ross
#34. My favorite part is being engaged with somebody's story and life, and getting a laugh with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for or not, and being challenged by the immediacy of conversation.
Marc Maron
#35. Kevin Hart. He's the man! I like his style. He's short, so I can relate. All the stories he tells are real. I respect that, and he's just a really funny dude - great comedy instincts. To do stand-up on a stage for an hour and tell stories and make people laugh is incredible.
Cameron Boyce
#36. We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.
Steve McCurry
#37. 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
#38. The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm
Kurt Vonnegut
#39. It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.
Rick Reilly
#40. The secret to being successful is to find a way to bring yourself through, even in your stories. People are looking for the essence of your truth. When you can bring your own truth to it, that's when it works.
Oprah Winfrey
#41. People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not."
"Shouldn't the storyteller believe it."
"The storyteller should tell it.
Cecelia Ahern
#42. I really unfortunately don't have tons of hilarious Sundance stories, because really I am not the biggest fan of hanging out, but the reason why is because I never go see other people's movies and I think that's the way to do it.
Lizzy Caplan
#43. When his [Donald Trump] projects go under, the first people that don't get paid are the contractors that he's - some of whom have gone bankrupt. They're calling me. I'm getting nonstop e-mails and calls now from people that have been scammed by Donald Trump. And their stories are heartbreaking.
Marco Rubio
#44. Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.
Diana Wynne Jones
#45. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
#46. 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
#47. People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.
Carole Bouquet
#48. I meant fact," Holden went on as if he hadn't heard Alex at all. "I thought if you told people facts, they'd draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don't run on facts. We run on stories about things. About
James S.A. Corey
#49. Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.
Sandra Cisneros
#50. I'm not sure if the Bible is a real book written by God or just a collection of stories for people who need help putting their hearts back together, but it's comforting, and I try not to think about it.
Shaun David Hutchinson
#51. 2 Hours for this conclusion is too much and it's ne big fucking lost...
...
What we know about the world... people and so on and so on as it follows it's merely from
Conspiracies, rumors and stories.
Deyth Banger
#52. People who live great stories know failure isn't a judgment, it's an education.
Donald Miller
#53. People in the news media after I got caught said how could you have not caught this guy? He had 50 corrections in four years. That's a lot of corrections. Well what they failed to look at is how many stories there were and out of 700 plus stories, 50 corrections is not a high amount.
Jayson Blair
#54. I want to tell stories powerful people don't want you to tell. It's not worth getting out of bed otherwise.
John Sweeney
#55. TV is a big business. In some ways, it's surpassed films, in terms of the way people invest in these shows and invest in these characters, and give up so much of their time to follow these people's stories.
Jamie Bell
#56. In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in the people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here in Los Angeles, there are less characters because they're all inside automobiles.
Joni Mitchell
#57. Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.
Bill James
#58. What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
Denis Johnson
#59. My grandma loved to be on stage entertaining people. She loves to make people smile and laugh. She loves to brighten other people's day. She often calls perfect strangers her angel, as a way of witnessing, but also to encourage and build their self-esteem.
Lisa Bedrick
#60. I don't really know the story of the Pied Piper. I don't read stories, first of all. I just remember either a rabbit or a rat leading people out of the village with a flute. That's all I can tell you.
R. Kelly
#61. Internet journalism is not a world we know very well at all. It's conducted more on the screen and less in bars, which makes it rather less useful for getting stories about people throwing up over one another, which is what one's after.
Ian Hislop
#62. I'd used people's stories and their lives to bolster my political arguments for changing welfare. Now, however, I was running into the people themselves, and I realized that using anyone's tragedy for political gain was cowardly.
David Kuo
#63. Yes, I receive fan mail. One of my favorite things to do is sit down and read the letters people write. It's really amazing the time people take to write these letters, tell their stories, draw pictures, etc.
Marisa Miller
#64. I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting.
Jacki Weaver
#65. The tabloids create their own stories about people's lives that don't exist.
Elizabeth Olsen
#66. As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated.
Stanley Nelson Jr.
#67. All professions, all work, all activity in the human world finds its essential meaning in the context of a people's cosmic story.
Brian Swimme
#68. I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.
Paul Park
#69. Heroes are more than just stories, they're people. And people are complicated; people are strange. Nobody is a hero through and through, there's always something in them that'll turn sour... you'll learn it one day. There are no heroes, only villains who win.
Joel Cornah
#70. People say 'Women's Wear' is a scandalous, gossipy publication. Sure we have gossip; we also have some very, very solid business stories. We are a creation of this business, which is fast, mean, tough, sometimes artistic, sometimes horrible.
John Fairchild
#72. If the subject is no longer living, the immediate question is do you have enough first-person material to really get that story across. You'd like to avoid it just being other people's memories and interpretations.
Brian Lindstrom
#73. Most people never think beyond their birth. But if I had contented myself with everyone else's opinions of me, I wouldn't be the man I am today. People like us make our own destinies, Gwenwhyfar - and to the waves with the naysayers who oppose us.
Jennifer McKeithen
#74. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood
Katherine Imogene Youngblood
#75. He strokes my hair and tells me stories and tucks me close like he's afraid I'll disappear. He paints pictures of people and places until I'm drowning in a drug of dreams to escape a world with no refuge, no relief, no release but his reassurances in my ear.
Tahereh Mafi
#76. Just stories? Stories can build up an empire, or strike down a people. You can spell the most powerful spell, ease a friend's hurt, or break an enemy. Stories make you believe.
Tobias S. Buckell
#77. There are some amazing stories from all over this country, where people's work and contribution has been acknowledged. To be part of that is an absolutely fantastic feeling.
Kenneth Branagh
#78. Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#79. I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together ... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
Denis Johnson
#80. That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.
Grace Paley
#81. Keep your Eyes on All that's Good and Beautiful and Possible in the World. Because "The Stories We Tell Create the People We Become.
Jacqueline Lewis
#82. What I tell people is be the best version of yourself in anything that you do. You don't have to live anybody else's story.
Stephen Curry
#83. Getting to share the stories in my head with other people and have them enjoy those stories, and having them come to see my characters as real. That's so cool.
Gail Z. Martin
#84. We all spin stories. That's what we do. We want people to see certain things about us and not others. What matters is whether you let others in to the truest story, the one that's the hardest to tell.
Maya Lang
#85. Theme is great for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight; it's not something that all readers have to care about.
Kurt Busiek
#86. What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It's about community. I also like everything Old Bay.
Barbara Mikulski
#87. September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
#88. It's annoying to be disapproved of by people who know only half the story, especially when you're not sure which half they know.
Robert Breault
#89. There's a lot of people that need these stories, and they can't come to my book, so I'm going to be the bookmobile and I'm going to come to them.
Sandra Cisneros
#90. At the end of the day, my life isn't about other people's work. I've got to stop giving stuff away. I've got my own stories to tell, and a great need to tell them. I've got these images, these thoughts in my head, and I need to find a way to cope with them.
Paddy Considine
#91. No matter what you watch, it has an impact. So, why not use this medium to bring great stories to millions of people around the world with the goal of not only entertaining them but inspiring them. That's what motivates me. That's why I get up every day.
DeVon Franklin
#92. One of my favorite stories is from Obama's first campaign: Michelle Obama was out there every day, collecting signatures and supervising the other people who did. If you were supposed to get 300 signatures and you only got 299, you had to face the wrath of Michelle.
Jodi Kantor
#93. Let's make really good stories that people get something out of. That's the one common denominator with everything I try to do.
Frank Spotnitz
#94. In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.
Russell Smith
#95. I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.
Michael Frayn
#96. Any medium can only live up to the strengths of the people working in it. If it's been used to tell bad or boring stories, it's not a problem with comics; it's a problem with the writers of those comics.
Marjane Satrapi
#97. The women I know are smart, interesting people who aren't just there to service the men's stories, so I don't know why our art continues to do that.
Carrie Coon
#98. Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.
Zephyr Teachout
#99. It's a privilege to have the career I have, to love every day and be following my passion, the stories that interest me, to remote locations and people. So nothing stops me from that - but yes, it seems redundant in documentary-filmmaker circles today to say the biggest struggle was financing.
Pietra Brettkelly
#100. Both 'Mabo' and 'The Sapphires' have been significant roles because it's about my people. They are celebratory stories, on top of allowing people to understand our history.
Deborah Mailman
