Story Finish Quotes

#1. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

Nancy Kress

#2. I was immediately swept up in Ariane's story. Equal parts thrill-ride and love story, The Rules is intense and emotional. This book stays with you long after you finish.

Sophie Jordan

#3. As far as I am concerned, the first episode of Buffy was the beginning of my career. It was the first time I told a story from start to finish the way I wanted.

Joss Whedon

#4. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

Anne Enright

#5. If I wake up during a dream I can usually go back to sleep and finish the story.

Marion Cotillard

#6. After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end.

Sarah Addison Allen

#7. The young are in great danger. Much evil results from their light and trifling reading. Much time is lost which should be spent in useful employment. Some would even deprive themselves of sleep that they might finish some ridiculous love story.

Ellen G. White

#8. About happy endings. Folk like a story to finish well. Doesn't matter if that's true to life or not. Helps to hear about folk being content. About good folk getting what they deserve. While you're listening you can believe, for a bit, that you're good too. Worth a happy ending.

Juliet Marillier

#9. Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.

Tom Rachman

#10. Continue do what you want, once, twice, third, fourth and so on and one moment I will just unplug this plug and... (you won't like from here up to the end the story..., so let's just finish it here. Let's make it you to like it!)

Deyth Banger

#11. Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

Neil Gaiman

#12. My first draft is the skeleton of the story. I have to go back over it from start to finish repeatedly, adding all the layers of meat to the bones until, eventually, it becomes a living, breathing thing.

Alisha Ashton

#13. I think kids abandon stories all the time. They start stories and get frustrated or get a different, better idea. I think that it is more worthwhile to stick with a story and revise it and try to finish it than abandon ship. Revisions, for any writer, are the name of the game.

Gail Carson Levine

#14. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like.

G.K. Chesterton

#15. The thought was this: to write the Sibeliuses' story from start to finish. To cull their story from the thousands or millions of conversations I had with them over the century that I knew them. To turn it into a book." -Elixir

Liz Moore

#16. It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began writing the thing.

Paul Kane

#17. Once you start recognizing the truth of your story, finish the story. It happened but you're still here, you're still capable, powerful, you're not your circumstance. It happened and you made it through. You're still fully equipped with every single tool you need to fulfill your purpose.

Steve Maraboli

#18. If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.

Kimberly Willis Holt

#19. What I've started I must finish. I've gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.

Michael Ende

#20. Can I finish my blasted story? We'll get to supernatural kindergarten later.

John Corwin

#21. Story ... if you could finish it ... you could rest ... you could sleep ... not before ... oh I know ... the ones I've finished ... thousands and one ... all I ever did ... in my life ... with my life ... saying to myself ... finish this one ... it's the right one ... then rest ...

Samuel Beckett

#22. You can't believe I would knowingly get involved with a drug user. <> I knowingly got involved with a guy who plays the tuba. Finish the story.

Rainbow Rowell

#23. Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good.

Haruki Murakami

#24. Do you have any idea how hard a story is to write? My brain is jumpy, and my heart doesn't know where to live. Is Male is such an imperfect narrator, but he will try to finish his tale.

Jenny Hubbard

#25. A real love story has to finish bad. That is what I think.

Marjane Satrapi

#26. Then Hannah said, 'Look, either you're going to talk or I'm going to have to finish the story about the guy who chopped off his penis. Your call.

Brigid Kemmerer

#27. Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

#28. But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

George Eliot

#29. I had been avoiding the D-word. But the kids cut right to it. My boys are well aware of death. My twins finish every story they make up with the same phrase: "Then everyone died. The end.

A. J. Jacobs

#30. If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.

Henri Matisse

#31. So there are countless reasons to remain on this Godforsaken planet that was long considered the only world, if for no other reason than to learn the end of our story: what the author of our lives has not yet taken the trouble to finish.

Filippo Bologna

#32. ... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves.

John Yorke

#33. When I'm writing, I try not to think things like, 'Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.' Books are very long and it's easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, 'Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I'm going to write two pages of it. That's all - just two pages.'

Linda Sue Park

#34. Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Salman Rushdie

#35. The satisfaction I feel from finishing another story is tantamount to, say, crossing the finish line for the career marathoner.

Susan Wingate

#36. Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself.

A.D. Posey

#37. You look at the part in '12 Years A Slave,' you finish that script - I mean, it's a powerful story. You go, 'Man, I have to play a bad character in this.' And then you go, 'Well, do I want to play a bad character and contribute to a good story?'

Paul Dano

#38. The only thing we got to keep were our memories, and now I was about to take those from him, too.
"Close your eyes," I whispered. "I' going to finish the story.

Alexandra Bracken

#39. I like working with south Indian directors because they are very disciplined. They visualize their entire story and screenplay in their heads even before they start shooting, which I respect. They finish their work on time. Being a disciplinarian myself, this suits my style.

Akshay Kumar

#40. If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.

Ben Okri

#41. Don't keep interrupting or I'll never finish the story.

Lois Lowry

#42. My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, 'dream on'. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming stories.

Hannah Kent

#43. If a story isn't working, I'm simply unable to finish it. That's what usually tells me something is wrong.

Len Wein

#44. Book Buzzed: When you stay up until midnight to finish a book, but then can't fall asleep until 1 a.m. because the story was so amazing.

Jennifer Bardsley

#45. Begin as if you will finish. Let the story be told that you had the courage to begin.

Mary Anne Radmacher

#46. Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

Robert A. Heinlein

#47. [Mike] just loves [his] motorcycle and he would take it out too early [in Green Bay]. In Green Bay, you've got ice until June, and he'd take it out sooner than that. He can finish the rest of the story. Ask him about taking the bike out a little too early.

Steve Mariucci

#48. Without death,' he answered, 'life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?

Seth Grahame-Smith

#49. Perhaps you're not finished with your story, and who knows if you'll ever finish it or not. Honestly, it's not that important.

Miguel Ruiz

#50. I play games on-set at work. Sometimes I can't remember people's names, so I start throwing out clues. Like if I can't think of George Clooney, I'll say, 'You know, drop-dead gorgeous, was on a big TV show ... ' Until someone says his name, I can't finish my story!

Andie MacDowell

#51. But right now, you need to finish this story. Because if I don't find out what happens next, I'm going to poop myself a little.

Brad Vance

#52. You're it. The one. The start. The finish. You are how my story ends.

Belle Aurora

#53. I remember liking to write stories pretty early on. In fourth or fifth grade, they would give us the beginning of a story, and we were supposed to finish it. I remember liking that. But I didn't think about deciding to become a writer until high school at about the age of 16.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#54. And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#55. Finish-the-fucking-story".
"Music!

Johnny Depp

#56. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Kurt Vonnegut

#57. I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.

Shane Black

#58. In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.

Philippe Starck

#59. Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

Grace Paley

#60. Once I have the grain of an idea, it haunts me until I finish the story. I don't like to be haunted, of course, so immediately get to work.

Gena Showalter

#61. The fact was that even though he knew the diary was blank, he kept absentmindedly picking it up and turning the pages, as though it were a story he wanted to finish. And

J.K. Rowling

#62. One story I've been trying to write for years, and haven't been able to finish, is about a face I saw, just a glimpse of a face, in a max security prison in North Carolina. I'm still trying to understand what I saw in that guy's face.

Peter Orner

#63. There are a couple of utterly important rules to writing anything, whether it's a novel, a short story or a collection of poetry. And they're really the only rules.
1: Quit talking about it and start.
2: Focus and finish it.

Nicholas Trandahl

#64. Without death, life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told.A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish? - Henry, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Seth Grahame-Smith

#65. She picked up her book and tried to read but it was heavy in her hands. She struggled to hold it, wanting to finish the story, wanting to know how it ended. She was afraid she'd run out of time before she ran out of book.

Louise Penny

#66. I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.

Robert Sheckley

#67. My mind skidded round a very short track and passed the finish line in a matter of seconds without any sensible conclusion.

Petra Kidd

#68. Remember, the things with which we choose to surround ourselves tell our story. Let's hope it's not "I choose to live in the past," or "I can't finish the projects I start." Instead, let's aim for something like, "I live lightly and gracefully, with only the objects I find functional or beautiful.

Francine Jay

#69. We finish our own story. The details of our journey are still a mystery.

Steven Cuoco

#70. Every good love story has a start and a finish. What matters is what happens in the middle.

Suzette R. Hinton

#71. I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.

Stephen King

#72. Alright, alright, I admit it: my husband is the quiet, kind, accepting parent, and I'm the one who wants so much to be part of our two daughters' lives than I can't even let them finish a story without interrupting.

Robin Marantz Henig

#73. You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

William Shatner

#74. The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.

Maggie Carey

#75. I prefer working, period. I think that I like doing film more just because when you get a script, you have the story from start to finish, so you can really find the character's arc, and when you walk away from it, you know you're sort of powerless to what happens.

Addison Timlin

#76. I don't know how it is with other writers, but most of the time when I finish [reading] a story or novel, I may be pleased, I may even be impressed, but somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking, I can do that.

F. Paul Wilson

#77. When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

Geraldine Brooks

#78. He didn't miss them. He didn't miss any of his life, really, especially the last year. Time had simply been a bookmark. Something that held his place while he waited to finish the story.

Mary Lindsey

#79. I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.

Anthony Horowitz

#80. THE FIRST FEW WORDS of every story are always the hardest to write. It's almost as if pulling them out, putting them on paper, commits you to seeing it all through. As if once you start, you are required to finish. And how do you finish when some things never end?

Amy Harmon

#81. 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