Quotes About Story

#1. It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

Tim Winton

#2. We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with 'Once upon a time.'

Jonathan Gottschall

#3. The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

Julio Cortazar

#4. Every actress has a line she'll draw, where she'll say, 'This I will do and this I won't.' For me, everything has to be important to the story and the director has to be able to tell me why.

Sheryl Lee

#5. The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.

Herbert Bayard Swope

#6. I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Beverly Cleary

#7. Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

Karin Slaughter

#8. No one else knows the whole story. I was there. I lived through it.

Christine Keeler

#9. Everyone has a story. It's simply a question of finding it.

Jennifer Castle

#10. I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

David Mitchell

#11. If you're directing, it doesn't really matter any more if it's going straight to TV - what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you.

Cary Fukunaga

#12. Since I began writing my new 'Bad Company' story, anyone who's connected with '2000 AD' has probably heard the sad news of the death of Brett Ewins, penciller and vital component of the original 'Bad Company' team.

Peter Milligan

#13. For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

Deborah Eisenberg

#14. This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

Northrop Frye

#15. Sophie: "For the Create-A-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning her-self in a tub."
Agatha: "I thought it was a better ending.

Soman Chainani

#16. No one's going to go see the story of Othello going to get a peaceful divorce.

Joss Whedon

#17. I know some actors feel classes are not cool or they create negative public relations, but I continue to crave the story just beyond my reach. To grasp that brass ring I need to continue to fine-tune my talents.

Michael Welch

#18. . . . I could't get lost in the story, not the way you need to be, to become somebody else.

Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

#19. People often ask why I write romance. It's because I believe in heroes and heroines who, after fighting their way through often-formidable obstacles, are rewarded with a happy ending. When the story's over, their future is just beginning and I really like that idea.

Debra Cowan

#20. Some of the screen's best moments were realized because a director went against all reason, all logic. No matter how incredible a story seems, it can be made credible. If you feel an insane idea strongly enough, you've usually got something.

Rouben Mamoulian

#21. It's getting late. If you're sleepy I can finish this later. No, it's fine, Tsukuru said. I'm not sleepy. In fact, he'd gotten his second wind, and wanted to hear the rest of the story.

Haruki Murakami

#22. Ninety percent of the children's books patronize the child and say there's a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don't do that. I treat the child as an equal.

Dr. Seuss

#23. I got to the end of the story before I'd realized what she'd done. Just as Jake had waited, interviewing the Mariners, Jillian had waited out my first answers so that I would give her a better one.

Jeanette Ingold

#24. I always believed 'The Fly' to be a classic opera story. It's a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice.

Howard Shore

#25. If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

Brene Brown

#26. Speak your truth quietly & clearly; and listen to others, even the dull & ignorant; they too have their story.

Max Ehrmann

#27. The initial spark usually has something to do with panic
I'm due to turn in a story to a workshop or an editor. It's a terrible working method.

Kelly Link

#28. This is the trouble with real-life story arcs: the happiness is so rarely saved for the end.

Richard Glover

#29. About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

James Nicoll

#30. Music helps define the character and is an extension of the character somehow, so that you are able to use both the songs themselves and the way that you sing them to tell something about the character and his story, as well as develop a performance style.

Alessandro Nivola

#31. All my friends were in the park smoking weed and getting pregnant. I didn't want to be the young black girl having a baby, a baby's father, being on welfare. That wasn't going to be my story.

Foxy Brown

#32. Of all the people around me, you know best that it takes two to complete a story; it always does

Refaat Alareer

#33. People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

Bob Iger

#34. Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#35. Kaz narrowed his eyes. I'm not some character out of a children's story who plays harmless pranks and steals from the rich to give to the poor.

Leigh Bardugo

#36. The woman leans the sadness of her body against the window, tries to look beyond the pear tree. Inside the story, she sees nothing but darkness. She is ungrateful for the luxury of despair.

Conchitina Cruz

#37. The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it's better not to tell the truth.

Louis De Bernieres

#38. But after that, I was extremely happy with the story and the look of the show at the beginning of season two - everything was working together. I felt like it was finished conceptually.

Joel Hodgson

#39. Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling.

David Farland

#40. Fiction is as easy as telling a convincing lie. The more believable the better the story.

T.R. Wallace

#41. It was more important to me to understand what its like to be this Jewish kid who felt he was so different at such a young age. I feel the story is about a kid who came to hate through love, so I felt I had to learn why he loved this thing so much that he also apparently hated it.

Ryan Gosling

#42. What we're really trying to tell, even though it's very much a genre show, is a very human story. Even in this heightened situation, it still comes down to people being people, and dealing with people as people. It really is about the seven people in that town.

Remi Aubuchon

#43. The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

C.S. Lewis

#44. If a young person experiences same-sex attraction, nothing you can say will change that experience. However, what you say can impact whether or not that student feels safe with you and whether or not they will be willing to share their story with you.

Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

#45. I think you gotta have some humor [in your story]. People gotta have a moment to laugh and feel that it's not taken 100% serious. That's important.

RZA

#46. With the e-reader, the whole book was on
the same virtual page. One could not feel the depth of the pages on the left side increase as those of the right side diminished, the
gradual progression from beginning to middle to end, the sense of where one stood in the journey of the story.

Daniel Seltzer

#47. I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.

Caitlin Moran

#48. [I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.

David Bentley Hart

#49. Be my bedtime story and the thoughts that won't let me fall asleep. Be the conversation that I always have in my head at 3 AM and that beautiful voice that never lets me sleep.

Akshay Vasu

#50. Be strong and of good courage. You are truly royal spirit daughters of Almighty God. You are princesses, destined to become queens. Your own wondrous story has already begun. Your "once upon a time" is now.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#51. I always like the story behind the story more than the story itself.

A.D. Posey

#52. I serve My Story.
I do not serve one Country.
Religion of Blue Circle
The Neverending Story
Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
September 13, 2016

Petra Hermans

#53. Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story that you just can't make up.

Michael Hirst

#54. I think this takes a lot of courage and integrity to find your own voice and way to express not only your story, but the reality you are setting it within.

Danae Elon

#55. What she tells the Japanese is this lost opportunity which has made her what she is.
The story she tells of this lost opportunity literally transports her outside herself and carries her toward this new man.
To give oneself, body and soul, that's it.

Marguerite Duras

#56. I can't tell a story in the white man's language, so I say what I want to say with my paintings.

Allen Sapp

#57. All the characters in this book are fictional, but they are as real to me as the members of my own family. I had to tell their story because they could not.

Maral Boyadjian

#58. I've been told that my music tells a story, but I don't know the story.

Tristan Murail

#59. Show me the story. I just want to tell a story that pulls me forward.

Debra Winger

#60. And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

Harry Chapin

#61. Big hooks have always been a part of American movie-making. So, to make a movie where you're just driving story through the characters without a high-concept is a challenge.

Steve Pink

#62. What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Stephen Graham Jones

#63. You must remind me: "Edith! Speak up! Tell the story." It has been more than half a century. I suppose it is time.

Edith Hahn Beer

#64. I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

Donald Miller

#65. You don't have to know me, to read my drama-story.

Shin Haido

#66. Take away the robots and the special effects, and Star Wars is just the simple story of a group of friends planning a terrorist attack.

Dana Gould

#67. Not only is a good prank harmless, but, like a good story, it reveals an essential truth that would otherwise be hidden.

Mac Barnett

#68. Today the story is no less attitude-adjusting. It is about the defining cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation.

Joel Garreau

#69. You are the effect of your story, that's all.

Byron Katie

#70. The story comes, and it is pure story. That's all I set out to write. But I don't believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.

Madeleine L'Engle

#71. Like white light refracted through a prism and split into many colors, God's eternal love-nature, expressed through the prism of time, becomes God's multicolored love story. History is His story.

Peter Kreeft

#72. The first step is to admit you're powerless. You have an addiction, and you can't stop. The first step is to tell your story, all the worst parts. Your lowest lows.

Chuck Palahniuk

#73. We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

Greg Rucka

#74. I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

Frank Serpico

#75. I see myself as a storyteller, I don't mind if the story is fact or fiction, if it's a good story I'd like to tell it.

Leanne Pooley

#76. Good and bad - this is the story of my life.

Martha Reeves

#77. Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#78. I created lots of characters in high school and college, and the first character I created in pro comics was Liana, Green Lantern of M'Elu, for a backup story in 'Green Lantern #162,' my first professional sale.

Kurt Busiek

#79. I told him because I wanted what everybody wants - to be known. To know oneself, and to tell the whole story of that self, and to be loved anyway.

Jan Ellison

#80. My first three-sisters novel in a while, 'Sandcastles' tells the story of the Sullivan family - two passionate artists and their three wildly different daughters. There's also a renegade nun and a mystery man, but I don't want to give too much away!

Luanne Rice

#81. The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

E. M. Forster

#82. Scripture offers the unique access to the story of redemption and then, in turn, funds tradition, reason and experience, as God's Word is remembered, experienced, and thought about.

Clark H. Pinnock

#83. ... what your life means depends on how you tell the story.

Matthew Woodring Stover

#84. I got the feeling: It's time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.

John Fusco

#85. Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most.

Brian Doyle

#86. For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.

Denis O'Hare

#87. A really good horror film has a story.

Dee Wallace

#88. I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.

Lorrie Moore

#89. In case anybody asks you about my position on capital punishment, you can tell them I favor it; and if they want to know why, you can tell them this story.

Ronald Reagan

#90. To know only part of the story is to know only part of the truth, a part of the whole, a part of a word, a part of yourself.

Riana Rain

#91. I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk

#92. A single prop that does not look real to an audience can louse you up. The same is true of the smallest flaw in setting up the motivation in a story line.

Desi Arnaz

#93. The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.

Elizabeth Alexander

#94. The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.

Katherine Center

#95. Every flower has a poetry of love in her heart, every tree has a story of struggle in his mind.

Debasish Mridha

#96. Countries and places have a history, a story, and a culture.

Moshe Safdie

#97. What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#98. So this is my cue of where to leave you. Now it's your story to retell and pass on. Because an idea is only relevant if it's being thought upon. So remember, never surrender.'Cause the unrelenting constancy of love and hope will rescue and restore from any scope.

Thomas Dutton

#99. Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

#100. It's about communication. It's about honesty. It's about treating people in the organization as deserving to know the facts. You don't try to give them half the story. You don't try to hide the story. You treat them as - as true equals, and you communicate and you communicate and communicate.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr.