Top 100 Quotes About What Story Is
#1. Every picture tells a story. But sometimes it's hard to know what story is actually being told.
Anastasia Hollings
#2. Anytime you're feeling stressed, anxious, or depressed, ask yourself, "What story is my mind telling me now?" Then once you've identified it, defuse it.
Russ Harris
#3. If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.
Evangeline Lilly
#4. What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple.
Paulo Coelho
#5. The hardest part of growing old is remembering what it was like when you were young. Alvin in The Straight Story (movie)
Dan Carruthers
#6. The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, 'This is also 'Fargo,' you know what I mean?
Noah Hawley
#7. The devadasis have a multilayered story, a story in which poverty, deprivation and injustice against women is central - but what has happened to them is absolutely an outcome of imperialism and the impact of British rule in India.
Beeban Kidron
#8. Part of what I want to do is sort of reclaim my story - it belongs to me and to my children, who have to live with whoever their mother is.
Elizabeth Edwards
#9. Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)
George V. Higgins
#10. What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.
Nicholas Royle
#12. When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves
that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.
N. T. Wright
#13. Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.
Italo Calvino
#14. Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you've been listening to - all the pieces of music you've ever heard.
Brian Eno
#15. I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?
Peter Orner
#16. 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
#17. Women think they can act like evil monsters from hell and be loved like a princess. It's as if the dragon and the witch was in them and not in the world.
Robin Sacredfire
#18. What I usually do is tell funny stories from the road, many of which are, of course, unprintable. But I don't actually have a joke. I don't tell jokes much. I tell little stories.
Howard Dean
#19. To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.
Laura Riding
#20. It is gorgeously shot, and Andrew believes that the old school way of making films in the best way. Meaning: you have a story, and you stick to the story. You don't change and alter the story because of people who've invested in it and what to put product in a shot.
Michael Berryman
#21. ... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again.
Jeremy Paxman
#23. Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.
Lydia Davis
#24. Life is so simple: We walk; we sit; we lie horizontal. That's about it. Everything else is a story about what's going on while we're doing it.
Byron Katie
#25. The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.
Melissa Febos
#26. What do you think the odds are this is going to be one of those cases where the butler did it? Because I could sell that story to any magazine in the country just for the headline.
Richard Castle
#27. Parents don't take a baby's temperature to decide whether the room is too warm; likewise, for global warming, we need a story that spurs us to do what is necessary.
George Akerlof
#28. The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.
Alan Cumming
#29. What is memory but a story about how we have lived?
Mark Doty
#30. When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.
Asghar Farhadi
#31. What storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.
Erica Jong
#32. When I sit down to write, I don't think, 'OK, what is the next David O. Russell film I can write, or what is Harvey Weinstein going to want to buy?' Or even, 'What are filmgoers going to want.' I try to think, tell a good story. Just do what you do.
Matthew Quick
#33. To me, Gospel music is really any music that's a testimony and tells a story of what God has done in your life.
Laura Allen
#34. This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
Wilkie Collins
#35. The stories are what no one wants to talk about. So you make up a story because no one is going to tell you the truth.
Sandra Cisneros
#36. Do you know what it means to be that beautiful & still hunted & still alive?
Who knows this story but the elephants & the trees?
Who says the grace of a black man in motion is not perfect
as a tusk in the sun or a single leaf taking its sweet time to the ground?
Danez Smith
#37. What we do with our lives every day, whether at school, a desk job, or keeping the home in order, is our most basic opportunity to glorify God. That's what your role in His story looks like day in and day out. Instead of waiting to be offered a new role, play the current one well.
Trip Lee
#38. You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
David Hare
#39. I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.
Yann Martel
#40. Raw and honest is what I go for [in my style of shooting]. I am looking for your inner beauty. The outside tells a story ... But together is raw honesty.
Nikki Sixx
#41. Ultimately, what audiences respond to is truth. Even as fantastical as the story can be, and out there, at its core, it's dealing with loss, madness and mortality.
Francesca Gregorini
#42. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#43. Big story at the Olympics regarding Michael Phelps. He stepped out with his girlfriend for the first time. She is a 25-year-old model from Los Angeles. Like every other model in L.A., She's dating an older retired guy. What's going on?
Conan O'Brien
#44. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Anne Enright
#45. Enemy-occupied territory
that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
C.S. Lewis
#46. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it and understand.
Sarah Dessen
#47. Starting out, they told me: 'You're a good-looking guy. We'll put you in this role, and you can be a conduit for the audience into this side of the story.' But I've grown up, and that's not what I want anymore. My concept of the job I do has evolved. And it is a job, nothing more.
Sam Worthington
#48. 'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through.
Michael Imperioli
#49. I don't understand it. What can there be in a simple little story like that to make people praise it so?" she said, quite bewildered. "There is truth in it, Jo, that's the secret.
Louisa May Alcott
#50. The inspiration really comes first from the character and the story. That vision of what the story is, and what the character is, the world that they inhabit and what the story wants to tell. That's really what inspires me.
Keanu Reeves
#51. Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#52. If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.
Edward Gorey
#53. If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.
Colum McCann
#54. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? ...
Eudora Welty
#55. When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.
Chuck Palahniuk
#56. Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables.
C.S. Lewis
#57. My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?
Black Elk
#58. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
William Faulkner
#59. I've never looked at my career in terms of, What haven't I done that I want to do? I just generally find a story that I think is a good one and go to work.
Kurt Russell
#60. If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.
Dorothy Allison
#61. What creates success on HSN is great product, a great story and a great storyteller.
Mindy Grossman
#62. I hate you," Kingsley said.
"That hurts, King. That stings."
"Do you know what hurts? Having an erection and being two seconds from coming and your domme stops sucking you off."
"That is a very sad story. Tell me more."
"I've created a monster.
Tiffany Reisz
#63. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this
two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
Tana French
#64. For me, when I see movies where I kind of know who the characters are and what the situation is, I get bored. To me, it's, "How do I tell a story that will keep the audience engaged?" A great story does that: it's not exactly what you expect.
Richard Shepard
#65. I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story.
John Hench
#66. Your ultimate life experience and legacy is being built moment by moment, day by day. Your story is being crafted by your every action, all leading somewhere, all leading to what one hopes will be a magnificent crescendo.
Brendon Burchard
#67. The one and original lovable monster is lost amid all the hydraulic manipulations in what now emerges as the story of a dumb blonde who falls for a huge plastic finger.
Judith Crist
#68. When it happens to you it's a national tragedy - Why aren't the papers reporting this? you wonder. Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is.
David Sedaris
#69. Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker ... [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?
Shirley Jackson
#70. Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.
Per Petterson
#71. I want you to send a hundred red balloons up into the sky every Fourth of July and make everyone who sees them wonder what the story behind them is all about. Let me live on inside of a made up story, Callum Andrew
Emalynne Wilder
#72. 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
#73. All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
Diane Setterfield
#74. When you're a screenwriter, it's like being a mechanic. You open the hood of the story, the director is the driver, and he says, "What do you think? It's a little tough."
Thomas Bidegain
#75. I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#76. The best way to understand another person's religion is to listen to the story of what particular practices helped them to deepen and to embody their religion, especially its spirituality.
Thomas Keating
#77. What is clear is that at some point my father determined he would write the story of his life himself, rather than let it be written for him by his tortured past. And this resolve was the greatest gift he bequeathed to his children.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#78. To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.
Jeffery Deaver
#79. The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.
Paul Ricoeur
#80. Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.
Katherine Mansfield
#81. What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!
Ray Bradbury
#82. If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.
If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong.
Neil Gaiman
#83. Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.
Lore Segal
#84. Children have always liked the princess story, but they never knew what was her name. I think the princess was, is and will always be you.
Amit Kalantri
#85. Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is - it's over.
Byron Katie
#86. Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
Lorrie Moore
#87. I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.
Laurie Graham
#88. The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
Salman Rushdie
#89. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.
Tom Waits
#90. Once you're into a story everything seems to apply- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.
Eudora Welty
#91. We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.
Phil Foglio
#92. Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means!" ~Alvis
Jess Walter
#93. Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?
Joe Abercrombie
#94. I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.
Brian Fallon
#95. In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.
Molly Antopol
#96. I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen and how it is denied.
Atom Egoyan
#97. Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'
Aaron Sorkin
#98. When you look at the New York Times, when you look at The Washington Post, when you look at CNN. I mean CNN is all Trump all the time. It's called the [Hillary] Clinton News Network. Every story is Trump. All day long no matter what it is.
Donald Trump
#99. Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.
Joseph Boyden
#100. Much of our life is guided by the beliefs we develop over the course of time; the story we create about what life's about, how we're supposed to be, what we're supposed to do or give.
Anthony Robbins
