Top 100 Story Well Quotes
#1. A good story, well told, makes you realize you were yearning for something you had no name for, something you didn't even know you wanted.
F.S. Michaels
#2. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.
Joss Whedon
#3. Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well
here is the truth
you have to talk yourself out of it.
Chris Cleave
#4. If you can tell a story well, you can move people to do something.
Soledad O'Brien
#5. The problem with trying to make a film good and have it work for an audience is the problem of trying to tell a story well. The shape or the color of it doesn't matter.
James Frain
#6. I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.
Mark Twain
#7. I am a story-teller working with a craft. My job is to use my craft - which is a different thing to my race - and tell a story well.
Gavin Hood
#8. As an actor, you know when you've got great material in front of you. When you're working, you think, 'Is this the one? The one that everyone will respond to and be moved by?' You pray that you have told the story well ... that your peers will see it and audiences will love it.
Demian Bichir
#9. I think any reading is good reading, even if it's commercial fiction. A good story well told is worth the time
Lynn Cahoon
#10. Even though Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me. But you want the story. Well, Corin and I were twins.
C.S. Lewis
#11. So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you'd laugh yourself unconscious, others so terrible you'd never want to repeat them. But I can't remember any of those. So I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing ...
Shaun Tan
#12. Portraying Pocahontas' story well was important to me because she was a real person and these were real events in her life.
Q'orianka Kilcher
#13. Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task ... But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.
Robert McKee
#14. You said you wanted my story? Well, I was swallowed by a hippopotamus. Except I didn't go into the hippo, I ended up in a tree. Then I sort of wandered here.
Brandon Mull
#15. Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.
Chris Bohjalian
#16. I think a good story, well told is a good story, well told, whether you're watching the episodes all in a row or not. However, it might be fun to take a closer look at how the previous episode ends and how that end relates to the beginning of the next episode.
Jenji Kohan
#17. If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.
Tom Wilkinson
#18. There is no such thing as just a story. A story is always charged with meaning...And we can be sure that if we know a story well enough to tell it, it carries meaning for us. - ROBERT FULFORD
F.S. Michaels
#19. I know that it's axiomatic in the film industry that you're not supposed to let the novelist develop their own story. Well, first of all, that's kind of up to the novelist - because they don't have to sell it. But also, I don't believe it. It's about trust.
Lenny Abrahamson
#20. Perhaps that same concept applied to people as well. Did we love them more when we knew their full story? How they came to be who and what they were? Or was the mystery what kept us coming back for more, slowly enticing us, knowing that once the truth was out, the appeal would be lost?
Amber Lynn Natusch
#21. You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
Tim Cahill
#22. Well, how did you die, then?" the old man finally asked.
"Die?" Matthew threw back. "Are you crazy? I'm not dead. I'm just very late.
J. Tonzelli
#23. It was suggested that I take a recording test. I passed, was liked and, well, you know the rest of the story.
Johnny Kidd
#24. Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.
William Pene Du Bois
#25. One thing I know for certain is that this killer - the Reaper - isn't my white knight. In fact, in this story, I very well suspect he may even be the villain. Because if Blaine ever finds out how I feel, it will certainly be the death of me." - Sasha
A. Zavarelli
#26. ..love is as complex an emotion as exists. There are many reasons why love does not prosper.
.. the waters are perilous, and you would do well to know that, because unlike your novels, not every story has a happy ending.
Mary Lydon Simonsen
#27. Well, we're originally from Glace Bay."
Grandma Elsie's eyes glittered. She was looking at one of her own, a lost Cape Bretoner in need of help and offering a new story. "Tell me all about it, dear.
Beatrice Rose Roberts
#28. Well, the big story
Hillary Clinton will be running for president in 2008. You know why I think she's running? I think she finally wants to see what it's like to sleep in the president's bed.
Jay Leno
#29. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
#30. Is that a True Story, Papa said. Well I won't say it's a Fact Story, Calley said, but Yes Sir I will say it is for god dam sure a True Story.
Bill Wittliff
#31. Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship - a great story!
James MacGregor Burns
#32. In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.
Anthony Burgess
#33. My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.
Ruta Sepetys
#34. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.
Julian Fellowes
#35. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
Adam Ross
#36. The story of the week is you have got to putt well to win the Masters and I haven't putted well.
Lee Westwood
#37. God as Master Weaver, Master Builder. He redeemed the story of Joseph. Can't he redeem your story as well?
Max Lucado
#38. I always wanted to tell the story of how Pearl Jam is the story of lightning striking twice. As well as being the flipside of the classic rock tale where great promise ends in tragedy. This is where tragedy begins great promise.
Cameron Crowe
#40. Well, when Kathy Kennedy, who is the president of Lucasfilm, came to me to ask if I'd be interested in working on this "Star Wars" movie, we talked about a young woman at the center of the story from the outset. And it was something that was always an important part of this movie.
J.J. Abrams
#41. Well, nothing ever ends well for crazy people in small towns.,
Molly D. Campbell
#42. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
Joyce Carol Oates
#43. Well, the moral of the story, The moral of this song, Is simply that one should never be Where one does not belong. So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin', Help him with his load, And don't go mistaking Paradise For that home across the road.
Bob Dylan
#44. I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
#45. Well sue me for staring. I'd be willing to scrub away my shame on his washboard abs.
Tia Giacalone
#46. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#47. People know the facts of a story just as well as the people on TV do, and they have more platforms to hold the media accountable when they don't get it right. We are a world full of media experts. That's a great thing.
Willie Geist
#48. I think sequels are fine if there's a story, so I think when there is a property that is worthy of a sequel, it could very well happen!
Roy Conli
#49. With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we're happiest when surprised by something we didn't know we wanted.
David Mitchell
#50. The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.
Lee Gutkind
#51. A story should, to please, at least seem true,
Be apropos, well told, concise, and new:
And whenso'er it deviates from these rules,
The wise will sleep, and leave applause to fools.
Benjamin Stillingfleet
#52. Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.
Stephanie Zacharek
#53. The funny thing is, whenever I'm working on something, I kind of forget there's a lot of people watching. It makes it easier to be in the moment and to tell a story as well as possible.
Michiel Huisman
#54. You may have told me your story, but you're still practically a stranger to me. I don't know the you that you are right now as well as I know your past.
K. Weikel
#55. While tributes to Americans who had lost their lives in battle had been held in a number of towns across the nation, one of the more well-known stories about the beginnings of Memorial Day is the story about General John Logan.
John Linder
#56. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
Samuel Beckett
#57. I think that in general
well, at least it's true for me
you tend to put something of yourself into the story as a whole. Not necessarily in any character, you understand. But you've got your own way of looking at the world, and that naturally will affect how you craft a story.
Sam Lake
#58. 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
#59. Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.
Nora Ephron
#60. I think the same way about theatre, you go out there and you are creating a world for a moment that can actually have a real impact on people, present some kind of story that gives you something to think about when you walk away, feeling enriched - if it works out well.
Jeffrey Jones
#61. I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.
Mark Millar
#62. No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.' The Commandant said it for me.
'Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it ...
Robert Edison Fulton Jr.
#63. Since all the world is but a story, it were well for thee to buy the more enduring story, rather than the story that is less enduring. - ATTRIBUTED TO COLUMBA OF IONA SIXTH CENTURY A
Sarah Arthur
#64. I feel like the great filmmakers who have a true voice, yeah they take the notes, they understand the notes, but it's really about the notes underneath the notes. When you do a test screening and somebody says, 'Well, I didn't like the love story,' but it was probably just too long.
Louis Leterrier
#65. You see a guy with one leg, he's got a story. "Land mine '69." You see a guy with one arm, he's got a story, too. "Snow blower, bottle of whiskey." You see a guy with one tooth, what would the story be? "Well, uh, I like a lot of taffy."
Dave Attell
#66. Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.
Anita Shreve
#67. I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.
Anne Michaels
#68. We're going to develop - what we want to do is to provide the viewers with what they want from CNN and that is the news. So when people tune in, they'll get the latest news, but they'll also get the biggest story of the day in depth, as CNN does so well.
Connie Chung
#69. I will tell you that the ego in me would love to play the lead. I would have loved to have been Buzz Lightyear, or Woody in "Toy Story," "Toy Story 2" but they hire celebrities for that, well-known people.
Bob Bergen
#70. I do like playing the darker side of life but as much as the lighter side as well. They all resonate out of the same place, which is that everyone has a story to tell. Depending on their upbringing and their history, it determines who they are as an adult. My job is to take the role from there.
Michael Eklund
#71. Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.
Jesse James Garrett
#72. They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
Michael Lewis
#73. And so I write this for you, My Sarah. With the hope that one day, when you're old enough, this story that lives with me, will live with you as well. When a story is told, it is not forgotten. It becomes something else, a memory of who we were; the hope of what we can become.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#74. Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Italo Calvino
#75. I hate complaining to strangers
you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#76. Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.
Julius Schwartz
#78. What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older ...
Mohsin Hamid
#79. I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.
Jason Isbell
#80. While the classic conversion story involves desperation, hitting bottom, and a plea for help, I think now that it was gratitude, as well as the suffering I'd seen, that made room for me to open my heart to something new.
Sara Miles
#81. I'm not going to name some of my colleagues who are very well-known for their television presentation, but they wouldn't know new information or how to report a story if it came up and bit them.
Bob Woodward
#82. How well you tell your story determines how well your customers tell your story.
Simon Mainwaring
#83. If walls could talk - scratch that, if walls could make sarcastic comments... well, things would be interesting.
Meghan Apriceno Carr
#84. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#85. A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
Richard K. Morgan
#86. The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. "Persepolis" also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency.
Marjane Satrapi
#87. Happiness has no history and the story tellers of all lands have understood this so well that the words "they are happy" are the end pf every love tale.
Honore De Balzac
#88. 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
#89. It's much more fun as an actor, as well. If everything is on the page and you're spoon-feeding an audience you feel like your job is merely to say the words clearly because the structure of the story will take care of itself.
Tom Hughes
#90. I've always had a love affair with New York City, and I've threatened to get an apartment there one day. But it just made sense for me to set 'Burlesque' on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. It's a place I know intimately well and love, and I think there's a great story to be told with L.A.
Steve Antin
#91. I suspected that they hadn't relocated to the coldest place on Earth and then taken up disemboweling pigs because things were going well in Europe, but it had never occurred to me to ask for the story. I
Hope Jahren
#92. The woman's march of today have deep roots and shoud be respected. Our country must find unification and not division, with men as well as women of all parties rallying around their cause!" Captain Hank Bracker, author of "The Exciting Story of Cuba.
Hank Bracker
#93. Well, it's more of a sane life to be part of an ensemble! I find that the work can be more specific too and I have to really make sure I know where I am in the story because I'm not in every scene.
Lauren Graham
#94. Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up.
George Saunders
#95. As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I've discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.
Myla Goldberg
#96. Designing the technical aspects of my camera movement for me is very important. I want the camera to be a big part in telling the story as well, like what I really believe in with all the films I make.
James Wan
#97. Executive assistant. "Mrs. Albrecht, how are you today?" "Very well. I just got here and thought maybe I had missed you." "Nope. I just got here too." "Come in, please." The house had a two-story entry area
Michael Connelly
#98. If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.
Gloria Steinem
#99. All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.
Stephenie Meyer
#100. Just telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made.
Jean Dujardin
