Small Stories Quotes

#1. I like small stories.

Paz Vega

#2. 'Freaks and Geeks' was my favorite show when it was on, by a wide measure. And that's the show I wanted to do. I noodled with the idea of doing a show about teenagers that told small stories, small moments of personal growth.

Rob Thomas

#3. I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.

Rachel Sklar

#4. 'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things.

Seth Shostak

#5. I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories.

Sigourney Weaver

#6. In a weird way, 'Veronica Mars' was my reaction to 'Freaks and Geeks' because 'Freaks and Geeks' was the show I wanted to write, the one I wanted to create, where there was no gimmick; you didn't have to have a teenage private eye. It was just these beautiful small stories about real kids.

Rob Thomas

#7. It's nice if you're making a regular pop or rock album and you get ten little songs. But I really try to make the album with one big story instead of ten small stories.

Hans-Peter Lindstrom

#8. I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

Alice Lowe

#9. Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

Etty Hillesum

#10. Cnut Longsword had near killed me with his blade Ice-Spite and it was small consolation that Serpent-Breath had sliced his throat in the same heartbeat that his sword had broken a rib and pierced my lung.

Bernard Cornwell

#11. Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.

Bryan Way

#12. Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.

Alice Dreger

#13. Such is life, my fellow-mummers-just like a poor player that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang and blanky, signifying-nothing.

Joseph Furphy

#14. It will be worth it if I am remembered, if not flatteringly, then at least with some small amount of accuracy.

Patrick Rothfuss

#15. Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums - and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.

Charles De Lint

#16. As far as how important the real-life resonance of the stories is, I think it must play at least a small role in the show's success, because it gives the show this sense of suspense from the fact that it seems at least plausible.

Michael Loceff

#17. Whether a project is large or small, it doesn't matter much to me as long as I feel I can serve the story as best as possible.

James Ponsoldt

#18. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Kellie Elmore

#19. The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.

Philip Reeve

#20. A short story is a messenger from beyond mere thought, that wanders the Earth knocking on doors, praying for a soul that will let it in.

Richard Small

#21. Garth on making his stories feel real "Things like armour, clothes and other small details are very important in building up the reality of the story... I do spend quite a lot of time on things like clothing, armour, weapons and try and make them feel real.

Garth Nix

#22. I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

Charles Kuralt

#23. In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone.

David Lynch

#24. The faery lords are immortal. Those who have songs ballads and stories written about them never die. Belief worship imagination we were born of the dreams and fears of mortals and if we are remembered even in some small way we will always exist.

Julie Kagawa

#25. Having small children and being an investigative reporter would seem like a difficult mix, but it worked well for me. I was often working on my own enterprise stories, which were not as deadline sensitive.

Jill Abramson

#26. Heather Lende's small town is populated with big hearts
she finds them on the beach, walking her granddaughters, in the stories of ordinary peoples' lives, and knits them into unforgettable tales. Find the Good is a treasure.

Jo-Ann Mapson

#27. I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

Ben Fountain

#28. And fairy tales are make-believe. They are the stories we tell to small children to make them believe the world is a far better place than it really is.

J.L. Vallance

#29. A three-pint problem

Melvyn Small

#30. The documentaries were something that I could do for a small amount of money, and then I felt like as long as I found the truth in the stories I was telling as a doc, I could teach myself filmmaking through doc filmmaking.

Ava DuVernay

#31. Baltimore was like a small town when I got there - the Colts, the Orioles, guys like Frank Robinson, we all knew and respected each other. Everyone would cross paths at one point at Lenny Moore's Sportsman's Lounge, trading stories and having some fun.

Earl Monroe

#32. Choices are much more practical and small when you're dealing with a real story. It's about execution, it's not about content.

David Simon

#33. The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous.

Matthew Pearl

#34. I know this is a weird niche, but a lot of my female friends have these strange stories where there their dads have seen the small successes of their daughters and have decided that they are creative as well.

Casey Wilson

#35. They'll want to know if I've written about them. Or, even as the title indicates with the names changed and such, they'll want to see if they can recognize any of the situations or characters laid out in the dozen stories. And that is just a small subset of a larger potential market.

Rich Siegel

#36. At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

Umberto Eco

#37. My mother has stories of leaving me in the bath as small kid, like a 3-year-old, and there being mirrors on the side, and her going to get a towel and coming back in, and me making faces at myself, like, 'Now I'm happy. Now I'm sad.'

Allison Tolman

#38. I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'

Jeff Lemire

#39. Adventuresome stories to life for kids big and small who dare to dream.

Jack Makhlouf

#40. I was very small, about 3 or 4 I think, and just wanted to be the people on telly telling these wonderful stories. Obviously the idea grew and matured with me but I can't ever remember wanting to do anything else. I've just sort of taken it for granted all my life that that was what I would do.

David Tennant

#41. I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space.

Debra Dean

#42. A story is a garden you carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for truth.

Alexandra Curry

#43. You get to tour some of the historic homes and listen to ghost stories."
"This is what people do in small towns?"
"We could either do that or go sit on my porch, chew some tobacco, and play banjos.

Nicholas Sparks

#44. The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment

Natalia Jaster

#45. It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.

David Almond

#46. I had written about a small hamlet upstate, and had been called into a meeting about my story, which, as it turned out, had upset a lot of people.

Tom Barbash

#47. If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.

M.R. James

#48. If we are to prosper together in our increasingly small world, we must listen to
and learn from each other's stories

Queen Noor Of Jordan

#49. The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)

Tom Callahan

#50. Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall.

Christie Purifoy

#51. I've loved fairytales, folklore and mythology since I was a small child, and I think it was inevitable that they would influence my style and my development of stories.

Juliet Marillier

#52. If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?

T.C. Boyle

#53. I like small, domestic stories.

Kevin Henkes

#54. There's so much more (to say) about being young and being a woman, but I feel like not a lot of those stories are being told, so you have to grab onto what ever small truths you can find and present it in the most honest way you can.

Jena Malone

#55. It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.

Ann Wroe

#56. Loads of overtaking is boring. You go fishing and you catch a fish every ten minutes and it's boring. But if you site there all day, and you catch one mega fish, you come back with stories that you caught a fish this big (indicates a big fish), intead of this size (indicating a small fish)

Eddie Irvine

#57. With the balcony doors completely open and folded up, his small room acquired an infinite vista. Somewhere on the horizon, water finally worked up the courage to embrace the sky.

Clara Chow

#58. They say a picture tells a thousand words, but photographs reveal only a small part of the real story about a person.

Brownell Landrum

#59. I think the actor has a tribal role as the archetypal story teller. I think there was a time when the storyteller, the priest, the healer, were all one person in one body. That person used to weave stories at night around a small fire to keep the tribe from being terrified that sun had gone down.

Ben Kingsley

#60. Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

Keith Miller

#61. With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

Rebecca Makkai

#62. I'm a small and normal girl, and stories like mine no one likes to tell. Fortunately so, because I wouldn't like to play myself.

Victoria Abril

#63. I notice young girls picking flowers off her gravestone; their clean hearts are soapstone. Their small sorrows are for children alone. And all of their stories will never be told.

Nicholaus Patnaude

#64. The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.

John Gunther

#65. Every town has its stories. Stories that have been told so many times by so many different people they've worked themselves into the collective consciousness as truth.

Jessi Kirby

#66. In college I wrote for the university newspaper, and I had several short stories published in small press. I think it's just been a natural progression of where to go with the imagination and not have to grow up.

Gabriel Campisi

#67. Turn around.
Only two words, but they deliver such a sensual threat.
I do as you ask without question. You are right behind me, breathing hard into the small of my neck, where I like to be kissed.

Felicity Brandon

#68. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.

Gloria Steinem

#69. When we read stories of heroes, we identify with them. We take the journey with them. We see how the obstacles almost overcome them. We see how they grow as human beings or gain qualities or show great qualities of strength and courage and with them, we grow in some small way.

Sam Raimi

#70. My dad hasn't said much about his college days. Oh, a few times, he might start telling stories. And I've seen some highlight film of him from college. I remember thinking he looked really small. Which is funny, because growing up, I thought he was a pretty big guy.

Andrew Luck

#71. Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It's difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Shawn Coyne

#72. Every small business has to become a publisher - a publisher of marketing messages and customer resources, and a publisher of stories.

Jim Blasingame

#73. Stories of her children when they were small, their round little bodies barely containing their personalities, which bloomed and glittered and melted into her.

Erica Bauermeister

#74. The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people.

Louise Brown

#75. You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

Karen Russell

#76. Yes, I'm often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt - an immense leap of an attempt - to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.

Markus Zusak

#77. '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

#78. I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

Richard Price

#79. A tree trunk the size of a man grows from a blade as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small heap of earth.

Laozi

#80. Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction.

LeCrae

#81. There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.

Charles De Lint

#82. I like to jot down ideas on the back of envelopes and to recognise the potential value in small things. I also like the freedom to think without feeling compelled to write too early. Stories are often better if we can hold back and get to know the characters and the sounds of language.

Nick Earls

#83. After Lock, Stock, all these really nasty small town characters came knocking at my door trying to tell me stories, and somehow I ended up with this guy whose brother was feeding people to pigs, and that's what he did to get rid of people.

Guy Ritchie

#84. We're all just in the muck trying to believe we're capable of greatness, but closer to breaking than we want to admit. And we tell ourselves stories
about ourselves,but maybe also all these stories about other people, about characters
as a way to hide from how small we are.

Doug Dorst

#85. I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.

Antonya Nelson

#86. If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.

Jean Houston

#87. Some directors can tell stories and it becomes very intimate and small, and it's almost like a secret. Some directors have the gift of finding a way to show it and tell the story, in a way that brings in the audience.

Noomi Rapace

#88. And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

William Shakespeare

#89. Great entrepreneurs are often great listeners and they can spot patterns and pick up on small details in customer stories.

Alexander Osterwalder

#90. I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.

Patrick Rothfuss

#91. They hadn't read as many stories as Malicia, and were rather more attached to the experience of real life, which is that when someone small and righteous takes on someone big and nasty, he is grilled bread product, very quickly.

Terry Pratchett

#92. My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes.

Jim Crace

#93. I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.

Michael Koryta

#94. In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.

Dan Ariely

#95. Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories

J.R.R. Tolkien

#96. Somewhere, there, is an analogy, in a small way, if you have the patience for it. But I guess it isn't a very good anecdote. I'm better at animal stories.

Dorothy Parker

#97. Our go-to source is no longer dictated by a small group of cable news outlets. We have to expand our view. Sometimes, a story is made and breaks on Twitter. We have to find a way to react to that, to consume and also disseminate the information from Twitter, which is not an easy thing to do.

Trevor Noah

#98. The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

Henry James

#99. Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

Virginia Henley

#100. Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

Don Roff