Stories As Quotes

#1. I loved putting on stories as plays when I was just six. I was the director, the actress and the set designer; I cast my girlfriends in parts, and I suggested to the local kindergarten teachers that we do free performances for the children.

Mili Avital

#2. Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

George Saunders

#3. I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

Khaled Hosseini

#4. 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

#5. I have a reputation for doing superheroes, but I like all kinds of writing. In fact, hardly anybody knows this, but I've probably written as many humor stories as superhero stories.

Stan Lee

#6. I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#7. I enjoy research as much as writing so I try to make my stories as fact-based as possible, which I think helps them seem more authentic.

Raymond Buckland

#8. Many fairy tales and ballads present us with animals who are nobler, truer, and kinder than the greedy human beings who desire to possess them. I guess I tend to read these stories as very early (and possibly unconscious) feminist texts.

Delia Sherman

#9. Theologian Stephen Crites says sacred stories are like dwelling places - like booths or tabernacles. We don't tell these stories as much as we inhabit them.

Sarah Arthur

#10. You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

Ben Okri

#11. Filmmaking became a possible way for me to combine my interest in photography and in gathering stories, as well as my interest in journalism and political science and international relations.

Joshua Marston

#12. One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach!

Camron Wright

#13. Eastern Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, are relative success stories, as they are not afflicted by the Arab heritage of retreat and humiliation at the hands of the French, Spanish, British, Turks, and Persians.

Conrad Black

#14. I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.

Alex Gibney

#15. I loved stories as a kid, both being read to me and enjoying on my own. All these stories inspired my imagination, and that's what I have always aimed at doing for my readers: ignite their imaginations.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#16. I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

Deborah Eisenberg

#17. I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear.

John Sladek

#18. I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#19. I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

Rebecca Wells

#20. I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.

Carmen Agra Deedy

#21. In Kelanna, when they mourn, they tell stories - as if the stories will keep you close to them. Believing that if they tell them often enough, for long enough, you won't be forgotten. Hoping that the stories will keep you alive - if only in memory. But

Traci Chee

#22. We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

Walter Mosley

#23. 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

#24. I wrote stories as a kid just for myself. One day, some of the kids in my class found some of my stories in my bag, and I was deeply embarrassed until I realised they enjoyed reading them.

Morris Gleitzman

#25. All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Flannery O'Connor

#26. You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.

Billy Bob Thornton

#27. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

John Green

#28. I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild.

Mary Gaitskill

#29. People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.

Louise Penny

#30. She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.

Chad Harbach

#31. I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.

Morris Gleitzman

#32. I am thrilled when I read about fans using my stories as springboards to read about either the historical characters or the myths and legends in the books.

Michael Scott

#33. One of the things that fascinates me most about the toys of the Sixties and Seventies is that they were characters without stories, as such.

Chris Roberson

#34. These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-white struggle between good and evil.

Gudjon Bergmann

#35. 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

#36. I think the biggest advice I can offer is don't just pick one story and stop, write as much as you can, as many stories as you can. The best thing about being a writer is, a writer's craft is nearly perfect because a writer can go anywhere and do his craft.

Dwayne McDuffie

#37. I'm interested in wartime stories, as I think it's important to remember what the soldiers went through.

Eliza Doolittle

#38. Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

Leni Zumas

#39. I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.

Alan Ball

#40. I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that.

John Darnielle

#41. I see dog stories as an antidote to the dire news that nothing is ever going to get better.

Bruce Cameron

#42. Every Mind Breaker I met was a true person inside and out. My name is Hayden Laevary, and these are their stories ... as well as mine.

Megan Duke

#43. I'd learned quite early in life that the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.

Alan Bradley

#44. I wish," said Dr Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me."
"You honor me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do.

A.S. Byatt

#45. The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.

Malcolm Gladwell

#46. Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

Glen Duncan

#47. As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#48. I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered.

Joan Gould

#49. If the Bible is called the Good Book, it's not because its people are. Blood flows as freely through the stories as the ink through the quills that penned them.

Max Lucado

#50. The mind needs stories as much as the body needs food. There are junk stories and more nourishing ones. The food we eat becomes our bodies, assimilated stories form our identities

David Loy

#51. James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols.

Jon Landau

#52. I had always attended classes and written stories as a creative outlet because I need that, and I thought, in my previous career in a model, the way I approached that was that I believed I was telling a non-verbal story.

Jessica Clark

#53. Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

James Lasdun

#54. Sometimes string figures were used to illustrate stories, as in the case of an Eskimo example that depicts a man catching a salmon. Sometimes they had magic or religious significance.

Louis Leakey

#55. When the Devil gets bored he tells stories to his bats and these bats fly to us and give us these stories as nightmares.

Philip Ridley

#56. It is dangerous to condemn stories as junk which satisfy the deep hunger of millions of people. These books are not literary art, but a great deal of what is acclaimed as literary art in our time offers no comfort or fulfillment to anybody.

Judith Skelton Grant

#57. I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.

Augusten Burroughs

#58. Our generation may be able to listen to sermons in a Joseph Campbellish way, treating Bible stories as instructional myths pointing to a deeper communal reality - that is, if we haven't replaced them with Star Wars myths or their equivalent - but don't ask us to believe with our heart and soul.

Gudjon Bergmann

#59. I remember writing all kinds of stories as a kid, but I really don't know what the first thing was. Whatever it was, I'm certain it was bloody and twisted, though, and probably involved talking cats.

Alistair Cross

#60. Presently we began to have our slices of the national cake," F. Scott Fitzgerald remembered, "and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti.

Bruce Watson

#61. I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

Donald Miller

#62. Aunt Fran lowered her voice. "Her cold is just the start of a greater sickness. These 'stories,' as you call them, will only lead her to more pain."
"Fran, talk plain, will you?"
"I'm talking about derangement."
"Don't be silly!"
She wispered. "And deviant behaviours.

Ami McKay

#63. I was hired to do as many Boy Commando, Newsboy Legion, and Sandman stories as I could.

Gil Kane

#64. I approach stories as a private educational enterprise: I want to learn about something. I teach myself through research, reporting, and thinking, and then, when I feel like I know the story, I tell it to readers.

Susan Orlean

#65. Even those, who some time ago believed all the stories about God, that is who believed that divine power exists, have now come to be so ashamed of their own belief, hiding their ignorance, they are now struggling hard to prove those stories as scientifically true.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#66. I'm not "filled with my art". I ain't got no art. I've got only a kind of craftsman's skill, and make stories as I make biscuits or embroider underwear or wrap up packages.

Rose Wilder Lane

#67. I have spend a lot of time on everything and what's impresses me about people I have written that in short stories as for the whole story, probably it should be here.

Deyth Banger

#68. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

Nick Hornby

#69. I do find that if I go out for a meal I can be listening to a few conversations at once all around me. It can drive my partner bonkers a little bit. But it's about being able to tell a lot of very different stories as well as you can and I do genuinely love what I do.

Christine Bottomley

#70. As far as the writing goes, I started telling stories as soon as I could talk, and started writing them down as soon as I could string words together.

Sarah Zettel

#71. I've got the best job in the world; I love it. I get to meet so many interesting people, and I get to make sure that other people with disabilities can tell their own stories as well.

Stella Young

#72. Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly.

Susan Hill

#73. It is an extraordinary world - full of love, grief, coincidence - and we shall never understand it. We should never try to. We should only be grateful for it. I reckon we should love, breathe, and say all will be well and believe it. And we should share our best stories, as often as we can.

Susan Fletcher

#74. Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

Richard Flanagan

#75. I never write my stories as a wake-up call as such. I simply explore the kinds of situations that I find personally challenging by placing characters into situations that challenge them in similar ways.

Ted Dekker

#76. While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them.

Eric Arrouze

#77. In Japan, there are storm channels on either side of the main roads. There were so many times when I'd fall into these ditches because I was lost in stories as I was walking along. It's still dangerous for me to drive. I've driven into the gate outside my house numerous times.

Hideo Kojima

#78. Books and movies inspire me, but I do my best to keep my stories as original as possible.

Nicholas Sparks

#79. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

Philip Schultz

#80. Everyone working on 'Tyrant' wants to present the world and the issues in it in an intelligent, open, fair, non-reductive kind of way. For the actors, we have to try and make these stories as truthful and compelling as possible.

Adam Rayner

#81. I always begin my stories as experiments - on large yellow tablets - a mixture of writing and sketching.

Bill Peet

#82. All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability.

Michael Scott

#83. I would like to use stories as a springboard for children to make their own creative responses. I would like to encourage them to express themselves using music, art, film or whatever, and upload it to a website having been inspired by particular stories.

Malorie Blackman

#84. Listening to others does not mean you should sound like them; find your own voice by telling stories as authentically as possible.

Carmen Agra Deedy

#85. This technology will obviously become more prevalent. Who knows what will result? One thing is certain, computer technology will revolutionize the way we tell stories as much as movie film has.

Chris Wedge

#86. I started writing stories as a child.

Danielle Steel

#87. '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

#88. All sorts of people told me their stories. Then they left, never to return, as if I were no more than a bridge they were clattering across.

Haruki Murakami

#89. So we face our final hours ... and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.

Tad Williams

#90. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.

Caitlin Horrocks

#91. Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.

Jim Woodring

#92. There is no such thing as a boring person: everyone has stories and insights worth sharing. While on the road, we let our phones or laptops take up our attention. By doing that, we might miss out on the chance to learn and absorb ideas and inspiration from an unexpected source: our fellow travelers.

Richard Branson

#93. 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

#94. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#95. Directors go their whole career without being able to tell personal stories and to work with a cast as talented as they are.

Christian Bale

#96. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.

Stan D. Jensen

#97. It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

Margaret Mahy

#98. 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

#99. But as a wise and great teacher once explained so patiently, all good stories - stories that touch your soul, stories that change your nature, stories that cause you to become a better person from their telling-these stories always contain truth.

Camron Wright

#100. We have all read tragic stories in our local papers about gun accidents as a result of misuse. As lawmakers we can better promote safety and responsibility by encouraging gun owners to purchase gun safes to store firearms and keep them from falling into the wrong hands.

Ron Lewis