Story What Quotes

#1. 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

#2. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

David Maraniss

#3. People are a lot more open than even they think they are. And I feel like I carry a heavy story about where I come from and those roots, but also what I like as a thinker.

Lizz Wright

#4. Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.

Kate Christensen

#5. Can I ask what you're reading?" ... She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. "Have you read it?" She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. "It's a sad story." "Sad stories make good books," She said. "They do.

Khaled Hosseini

#6. The beauty of being an Author is, It's your story and you can write what ever you want.

Toni House

#7. I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.

William Monahan

#8. What we gain in the world, we lose in the world, forgotten in death. We must rather fancy what we brought into the world, for therein lives our story, our legend.

Palle Oswald

#9. I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.

Rian Johnson

#10. What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple.

Paulo Coelho

#11. A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.

Chuck Klosterman

#12. You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.

Donald Miller

#13. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

#14. I think that's the lesson of this story: you never know what is going to happen.

Mindy Kaling

#15. The hardest part of growing old is remembering what it was like when you were young. Alvin in The Straight Story (movie)

Dan Carruthers

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The Irish tell the story of a man who arrives at the gates of heaven and asks to be let in St. Peter says, "Of course, just show us your scars." The man says, "I have no scars". St. Peter says, "What a pity was there nothing worth fighting for"?

Martin Sheen

#19. It's like reading a good book. The kind where you don't want to skip pages to see what happens at the end. Each moment is a story in itself.

Renee Carlino

#20. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Linwood Barclay

#21. The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.

Benjamin Cohen

#22. The Story Core Every compelling story has the following five elements: 1) A character 2) The character wants something 3) But something prevents him from getting what he wants easily 4) So he struggles against that force 5) And either succeeds or fails

Libbie Hawker

#23. I'm not even that upset about the rejection any more. What bothers me most is that I haven't got to the end of my story, and I can't start over with someone else, it's too hard.

Paula Hawkins

#24. It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

Jaime Hernandez

#25. I'll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don't have any anthologies anymore, do we?

Aaron Spelling

#26. 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

#27. The story of money is very funny. Others burn what we earn. Why not give as we live, so the world will cry when we die. -RVM

R.v.m.

#28. It makes sense that that's part of the story and everything, but that's part of any story of any record - where was it record and how long and what were the people doing. I think people want to know where these events are made. That's why I like the word "record."

Justin Vernon

#29. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

Ira Sachs

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. I told my mom I was going to do a movie about a son who hears a story about his mom and takes her on a cross-country road trip, and I wanted to actually take the trip with my mom to see what it would be like to drive cross-country with your mom.

Dan Fogelman

#33. Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

Sharon Salzberg

#34. I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life's chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.

Jolina Petersheim

#35. When you're afraid because you don't know what comes next, I will be there to love you through it. So, I guess today, I'm asking you to let me.

Courtney Giardina

#36. As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Nancy Kress

#37. Yet if strict criticism should till frown on our method, let candor and good humor forgive what is done to the best of our judgment, for the sake of perspicuity in the story and the delight and entertainment of our candid reader.

Sarah Fielding

#38. Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.

C.S. Lewis

#39. Once upon a time, there lived a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really the story was: Once upon a time, there lived a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

Maggie Stiefvater

#40. We like things to manifest right away, and they may not. Many times, we're just planting a seed and we don't know exactly how it is going to come to fruition. It's hard for us to realize that what we see in front of us might not be the end of the story.

Sharon Salzberg

#41. the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.

Sam Miller

#42. As our characters in our 'X-FORCE' began to push at the boundaries of what 'X-FORCE' was, it made perfect story sense for the team to change their name.

Peter Milligan

#43. We take it for granted we know the whole story - We judge a book by its cover and read what we want between selected lines.

Axl Rose

#44. Your dad's story is over. In six months or a year, this will be done for him. He won't be dealing with the consequences of what you choose to do now. You will. So you make this decision based on what you need.

Jason Schmidt

#45. It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.

Leslie What

#46. What it taught me was forgiveness. It taught me that when people present themselves in a certain way, there's probably some back story or issue or reason for the way that they are. It's not you. It's them. And a lot of times, its about something that's completely out of their control

Denzel Washington

#47. What the hell did people have to keep them occupied on a damp and windy day in January apart from sitting indoors and lapping up the story of somebody who had suffered even more than they were doing.

Hakan Nesser

#48. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.

Dana Brunetti

#49. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#50. This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.

Ann Hood

#51. My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.

J.H. Wyman

#52. I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.

Philip K. Dick

#53. My first U.S. Open I think was just very special for me because that was sort of the beginning of what was a 'Cinderella' story for me.

Chris Evert

#54. Stories
individual stories, family stories, national stories
are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Yann Martel

#55. You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing - it was a feeling. The blues is nothing but a story ... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing ... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

David Edwards

#56. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.

A.D. Posey

#57. Don't go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat - tell it to me.

Pat Conroy

#58. What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.

Tom Robbins

#59. I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.

Yann Martel

#60. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

#61. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

Salman Rushdie

#62. Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter, in whatever field you choose to explore.

Nathan Wolfe

#63. Think of life as a story. Each one must come to an end, for it to have form and meaning. What gives life to the stories are the bodies at the end of them.

Rajesh Parameswaran

#64. 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

#65. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Tim O'Brien

#66. It's not every day you get to do what you love and have a major story behind it.

OMI

#67. 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

#68. What I like best is a good story with a moral.

Oscar Micheaux

#69. 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

#70. His eyes burned mine. "You just fight for what you want Katherine. The question is, how much do you want me?" Am I worth the fight? The question was implied and his eyes were begging me for assurance.

Carolina Soto

#71. As cliched as it sounds, if you have an original voice and an original idea, then no matter what anybody says, you have to find a way to tell that story.

Damon Lindelof

#72. Be the hero of your children's story. Never let them believe for a minute that honor, courage and doing what is right is only reserved for other fathers and mothers.

Shannon L. Alder

#73. I wanted to be the one who eased the pain for him, to give him what he wanted. The sad reality of the story was I would never be that girl. And he would never be that man.

Lucia Franco

#74. The more people talk about eating disorders, the more people get the real story about what they're like.

Scarlett Pomers

#75. I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.

Percival Everett

#76. What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Grace Paley

#77. 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

#78. I would say what was always on her[Harper Lee] mind was the stories she had to tell, and the story was pretty obvious in "To Kill A Mockingbird," maybe a bit - little bit less obvious and more obscure in "Go Set A Watchman."

Wayne Flynt

#79. He said he wants variety. The irony is that I wanted variety too. But I wanted variety in a solid, stable committed relationship where I would wake up each morning asking "What are we going to do today?" not asking "Who are you going to do today?

Aimee Lane

#80. We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

Barbara Kopple

#81. It's encouraging to watch what people will do to contribute to a love story. It's as though we universally recognize the union of souls is worth sacrificing for.

Donald Miller

#82. Because Naughty Dog relies on their facial team to hand animate the faces of each game character and they do such a remarkable job, I think you can be more realistic with your acting. It gives the story and what's happening to you the feeling that it's a game.

Nolan North

#83. Trying to find the story within the story was hard. Filmmaking is such a reductive process in a strange way and you keep whittling away to what is essential.

Mark Ruffalo

#84. A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.

Matthew J. Kirby

#85. What are you thinking about?"
"Whether they'll write my life story as a tragedy or an epic fantasy.

Maggie Stiefvater

#86. I feel like it's important to be flexible, particularly when I'm coming in late in the game and I'm connective tissue in the story. I'm not at the very center. It's important for me to have a certain kind of flexibility and try to help people do what they need to do.

Willem Dafoe

#87. I have spoken of Jonah, and of the story of him and the whale. - A fit story for ridicule, if it was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to try what credulity could swallow; for, if it could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything.

Thomas Paine

#88. I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

#89. 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

#90. In planning anything, the best place to begin is at the end. What outcome do you want? How do you want the story to end? How do you want to be remembered when you are gone?

Michael Hyatt

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. What if trials of this life, the rain, the storms, the hardest nights, are Your mercies in disguise?

Laura Story

#94. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

Steven Pinker

#95. I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

Dorothy Fields

#96. What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

Lisa Cron

#97. I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

Tamra Davis

#98. I try mainly to just focus on character and what my character's point of view is, with each person, and try to figure out story.

Katie Cassidy

#99. There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Richard Linklater

#100. I do like to keep abreast of what the hardcore vocal members of the comics-reading audience are talking about on Internet message boards, but there are so few of them, as a percentage of the buying audience, that I can't allow their opinions to dictate story direction.

Grant Morrison