Top 100 Story's Quotes
#1. If the story's there for it, if there's a reason for it, then I'm all for it. But if you throw in a barbed wire match just to do a barbed wire match, then it makes no sense to me.
CM Punk
#2. If you do a story about a British journalist rescuing a child from Sarajevo, then Sarajevo just becomes an exotic location, and the story's about this British journalist.
Michael Winterbottom
#3. Don't despair for story's future or turn curmudgeonly over the rise of video games or reality TV. The way we experience story will evolve, but as storytelling animals, we will no more give it up than start walking on all fours.
Jonathan Gottschall
#4. For me, the only ego that needs serving in putting together a film is the story's, the ego of the story and it's the piece itself that you want to bring out the voice of the piece. You're really serving that and that's the thing that you have a basic understanding of.
Julia Ormond
#5. The whole thing of doing a TV series, I find it very daunting not knowing where the story's going.
Danny Huston
#6. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
George Stephen
#7. It's bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story's a story, whether it's beautiful or bullshit.
Hassan Blasim
#8. Christy Barritt's novel, Hazardous Duty, is a delightful read from beginning to end. The story's fresh, engaging heroine with an unusual occupation hooked me, and I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend Hazardous Duty.
Colleen Coble
#9. The joy of just being involved in something, of being part of a big process, just as a human being, it's nice to be part of people who are in the same enterprise, heading for the same goal, rather than, 'Oh this is all about me and my role. The story's about me.'
Ciaran Hinds
#10. Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Lynn Abbey
#11. But almost every story begins with another story's end.
Katie Kacvinsky
#12. The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.
Alan Cumming
#13. I want the Reader of Words to scan it before I send." She bent down and pressed a kiss to his neck. "Our story's pretty epic.
Kresley Cole
#14. Digging a ditch where madness gives a bit
Digging a ditch where silence lives
Digging a ditch for when I'm old
Digging this ditch my story's told
Where all these troubles weigh down on me will rise ...
Where all these questions spinning round my head will die
Dave Matthews
#15. It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.
Helen Oyeyemi
#16. 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
#17. Every story's trying to say something. It's trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It's the writer making a case.
Chuck Wendig
#18. Your brand story's "happily ever after" involves open wallets.
Laura Busche
#19. Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
William Kittredge
#20. Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.
Norman Lock
#21. A knife can be a symbol, but it also better be able to cut string. And if it represent cutting free, cutting loose, in the story's beginning, it better not be used to prop up a bookcase and then forgotten later on.
Ansen Dibell
#22. A good story's like a door, and you can go through it whenever you need to. After you've read it or seen it or heard it, you can still go back through it. Once it's yours, it's always yours.
Nora Roberts
#23. The more I come to recognize my story's place in God's grander Story, my once-bewildered questions are turning to psalms of thanksgiving at the wonder that I have been included in what He is doing.
Gloria Gaither
#24. Facts are important, but the story matters. Poorly presented facts can even get in the way of the story's impact.
Blake Mycoskie
#25. It doesn't matter the amount of gore, the amount of shocks that you can have in a movie if the movie's not entertaining, if the story's not entertaining.
Fede Alvarez
#26. Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story
Stephen King
#27. One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story's wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.
Neale Osborne
#28. When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.
Don Roff
#29. If two or more organs of the body are not squirting fluids, the story's no good!
Christopher Vogler
#30. Stories are all around us, caught in the throats of the strangers you walk past and scrawled on the pages of locked diaries. They're in love letters that were never sent and between the lines of every conversation ever spoken. Just because your story's not written down doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Jodi Picoult
#31. Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.
Paul Ricoeur
#32. A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.
Norman Lock
#33. I think a good story's a good story and a good character's a good character.
Michael Sheen
#34. He was up to his neck in it. He was breathing the air of its world, adapting to its gravity. The story's essence had permeated every part of him, to the walls of his viscera.
Haruki Murakami
#35. But you have to learn to bend a little," said Clary with a yawn. Despite the story's content, the rhythm of Jace's voice had made her sleepy. "Or you'll break." "Not if you're strong enough," said Jace firmly.
Cassandra Clare
#36. When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
#38. The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."
Steven Pressfield
#39. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
Shirley Jackson
#40. They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.
Ben Bradlee
#41. Its message is the story's two theological affirmations: (1) God's word is truthful and authoritative; and (2) the fulfillment of his promise of land is coming to pass.
Kenneth A. Mathews
#42. Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.
Gene Wolfe
#43. Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.
Etgar Keret
#44. An ending to my story," he said. "My story's ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all.
Adam Johnson
#45. The effect your readers want is for what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what's happening in the story. They don't want approximations, they don't want a report, they want to experience the story's reality.
Ray Rhamey
#46. With young people, it's how brassy and flashy can you be. But you get a bit older, it's about how restrained can you be. You have to feel it all, think it all, but you don't have to play it - it's just gotta be there, and if the story's good and the script's good, people will see it.
Robert Taylor
#47. If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
Stephen Graham Jones
#48. We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story's end.
Harlan Ellison
#49. For me, a story's a story if people want to hear it; it's very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I'm speaking it out loud.
Sandra Cisneros
#50. Yes," said Hardacre, "but it's not real. We're not real. And when the story is all told, when He writes 'The End' at the bottom of the last page, then all this will wrap up. No more Hell, no more Heaven, no more angels, devils, saints or sinners. The story's done. It will be as if we never were
Matthew Hughes
#51. I think that sharpens the intention of a scene and clarifies a story's arc. Of course, I don't seek the questions until after I've written a scene - or maybe after I've daydreamed it.
Edan Lepucki
#52. I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told, and I have squandered my resistance, for a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises. All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest ... la-la-la-la-la-la-la-lala-la-la-la-la ...
Paul Simon
#53. Nobody said it had to be a story with an ending all neatly tied up like some ridiculous fairy tale. This story's true, and true stories don't have endings, because things just keep going.
Kate Milford
#54. The story's what matters; spelling's overrated.
Adam Langer
#55. When it comes to bending the truth to assist a story's plot versus staying completely true to the facts, we can assure you any dramatist will always select the former. Mark Twain's old saying "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story" still reigns in Hollywood.
James Morcan
#56. Every story has a true name. I wish this story's name could be different, but nothing will change it. This story is The Book of You.
Claire Kendal
#57. I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.
Ron Rash
#58. I come from a long line of serial embellishers. Sometimes a good story's got a ghost in it; sometimes a panther chases my Uncle Bill and Fred Price home from a coon hunt.
Tony Earley
#59. When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.
Anthony Marra
#60. 'Homeland' is necessarily open-ended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving as little as possible, with a story's usual need for resolution replaced by an unrelenting urgency that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure.
Steve Erickson
#61. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.
Patrick Ness
#62. Comedy, drama, Westerns, sci-fi ... it's all fine if the story's compelling and the character is interesting to me. I do like action a lot.
Jensen Ackles
#63. The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it."
Tone?'
The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened.
Tim O'Brien
#64. If the story's interesting and it's a compelling script, I'd be thrilled to be a part of it.
Andre Braugher
#65. I'm all about the story. If I like the character and I think the story's entertaining, I'll do it.
Cynthia Stevenson
#66. If I have to wear a hat as a producer to do that, then I'm willing to do that. An actor's, producer's and director's point-of-view is all the same to me, as long as the story's being told.
Michael Eklund
#67. I love the way a story's ending can force you to read backwards. It's as if you are slowly adjusting a kaleidoscope until a random scattering of colored crystals suddenly falls into a beautiful symmetrical pattern.
Catherine Brady
#68. Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.
P.L. Travers
#69. I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.
Stephen Graham Jones
#70. It's absolutely of no importance who or what V was under the mask. He isn't a who or a what, he's an idea. The thing is, you couldn't continue it. Now and then the idea of a sequel has been raised, in vague forms, but I think it would be a bad idea. The story's finished.
David Lloyd
#71. Once your best story's told it, can't be told again. It makes you, then it ruins you.
Benjamin Wood
#72. Make sure you test your brand story's recipe with whomever you're cooking it for.
Laura Busche
#73. I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.
Alfonso Cuaron
#74. I wanted to let form lead my thinking, and repetition always confronts you with the interesting problem of how to break out of a cycle that seems so deterministic, which was germane to the story's concerns.
Catherine Brady
#75. In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.
Darin Strauss
#76. This story's gonna grab people. It's about this guy, he's crazy about this girl, but he likes to wear dresses. Should he tell her? Should he not tell her? He's torn, Georgie. This is drama.
Ed Wood
#77. For complexity does not inevitably heighten a story's verisimilitude, or its power to convince; sometimes simplicity and economy make for a more vigorous exposition, propelling the drama forward.
Yan Lianke
#78. People often ask why I write romance. It's because I believe in heroes and heroines who, after fighting their way through often-formidable obstacles, are rewarded with a happy ending. When the story's over, their future is just beginning and I really like that idea.
Debra Cowan
#79. Fiction books give the reader a chance to step away from their own reality and into the shoes of the characters, and they show you a world that isn't the one you already know. And sometimes the story's not so different from your own, and it lets you get closer to your own feelings.
Shin Towada
#80. You don't pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking - the story's going to die on its feet.
Ray Bradbury
#81. Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything. Once you say the character is in love, he can do the craziest thing that nobody would do who's not in love. Once you're in love, you have that excuse to go and do whatever you want.
Josh Hutcherson
#82. I think you've all heard my story about my daughter and how we felt Children's Hospital saved her life when she was less than a year old. I won't go through all of the details of that.
Jack Nicklaus
#83. It's no longer about the Lost Boys. They keep trying to make their way out, then they meet other people and empathize with them. It's a story that a lot of people are going to discover their purpose from. When someone doesn't know their purpose, they get lost.
Emmanuel Jal
#84. I'm wondering if you can speed this story up a bit," Ms. Jordan said. "I spilled pudding on Missy Trillin's head while she was taking a pee." "I see." Ms. Jordan nodded. "Now I think we're getting somewhere.
James Patterson
#85. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich's, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#86. There might be a proper age to know how to tell a story, but there's no proper age to start telling them.
Xavier Dolan
#87. 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
#88. The beauty of being an Author is, It's your story and you can write what ever you want.
Toni House
#89. 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
#90. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.
Cesar Aira
#91. I don't mind UFO's and ghost stories, it's just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.
Robert Stack
#92. Someday an opportunity will come. Think about Harry Potter. His life is terrible, but then a letter arrives, he gets on a train, and everything is different for him afterward. Better. Magical."
"That's just a story."
"So are we- we're stories too.
Matthew Quick
#93. Then there's the story of ill-fated love. It's universal.
Rita Moreno
#94. Liberation of mind is realising that we don't need to buy any story at all. It's realising that before our confused thought, there actually is Reality. We can see it. All we have to do it to fully engage in this moment as it has come to be.
Steve Hagen
#95. Soul Mountain, the story of one man's quest for inner peace and freedom.
Gao Xingjian
#96. 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
#97. Every story holds insight into the writer's soul. If the soul can't be found, the writer didn't bleed enough.
M.L. Stephens
#98. Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.
Glen Duncan
#99. I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.
Tom Hooper
#100. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Tobias Wolff
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