Top 100 The Best Stories Quotes
#1. David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.
Terry Southern
#2. Living your life is a long and doggy business ... And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time.
Anne Fine
#3. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.
Katherine Center
#4. The ultimate act of heroism shouldn't be death. You're always saying you want to give Baz the stories he deserves ... So you're going to kill him off? Isn't the best revenge supposed to be a life well-lived? The punk-rock way to end it would be to let them live happily ever after.
Rainbow Rowell
#5. We can't compare stories. We can only know in our hearts that we are the same. That may be the best we can do.
Betty Buckley
#6. Every couple has two stories - the edited one to be shared from the couch and the unabridged version best left alone.
Emily Giffin
#7. The best adventures in life is in the present. Seize the present and make it great adventure.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#8. but the stories on the edge of civilization are horrible things. They're as cruel and violent as the nastiest fairy tales, but they don't have any hope or happily-ever-afters. They have victims, not heroes. The best you get is to escape and go home.
Richard Roberts
#9. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#10. 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
#11. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#12. The best lives and stories are made up of minute particulars that somehow are also universal and of use to others as well as oneself.
Barbara Myerhoff
#13. Whenever I work on a film, I have three rules. Only three and I tell them to every screenwriter. I say let's retain the spirit and the intent of the overall story. Let's make it the best film that we possibly can.
Nicholas Sparks
#14. Admittedly, the masturbation story is just a "Hey, this is one of my best-of's, I'll throw it in the special." But the grandmother stuff, really, I feel like is part of the theme and part of the best way to end the story that I'm telling with the special.
Jen Kirkman
#15. With some stories, you really can't rush things. And it's often best just to sit back and enjoy the journey for what it is.
Melissa Hill
#16. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff
#17. Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.
Andrew Barger
#18. These, and many of the other best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false ... the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be.
Joe Hill
#19. [The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented ...
Faulkner in the University, 117
William Faulkner
#20. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#21. Adam searched out old friends from the neighborhood. They drank beer together in the garden of the Stag & Hounds, trading stories and trying their best to ignore the inescapable truth - that the ties that once bound them were loosening by the year and might soon be gone altogether.
Mark Mills
#22. Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
Mark Twain
#23. Complicated love stories are the best kind.
Amelia LeFay
#24. In my experience, love is a destructive force, tearing hearts to shreds and forcing people to pick up the pieces. Even the best love stories are violent tales.
Karina Halle
#25. The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.
Robert Galbraith
#26. Book is the best friend, have no demand, no complain
Avi Salmon
#27. I think that the best way you can get honesty across in your music to connect and relate to people is to be motivated by personal emotions, stories and feelings.
Christina Aguilera
#28. There is pressure when you have a very big book like 'Shadow Divers' to follow up with something big. But you can't let that pressure determine what you do. You just look for the best stories, and when you find a great one, you tell it.
Robert Kurson
#29. But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back - all the stories say so. Look what happened to Lot's wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings?
Stephen King
#30. If you're gonna let the character be the story, you better set a tone that allows the actors to do the best work they can do.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#31. We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
Neil Gaiman
#32. We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
Barbara Deming
#33. This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's, on its best day, is a crude art. We make mistakes; I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist, I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories, make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.
Dan Rather
#34. It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.
Rick Reilly
#35. A man is the stories he tells about himself, and most of those stories are lies. Never look too closely. If you uncover his lies, it'll humiliate you both. Best just to live with the bullshit.
Dennis Lehane
#36. I try to find stories that I would think that everyone would find interesting, and just a good entertaining story, and then if I can find a story that has a raison d'etre behind it that I feel is important then that's the best for me.
Norman Jewison
#37. The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand.
Hanif Kureishi
#39. F(r)iction is the best of everything we've ever loved. F(r)iction is experimental. F(r)iction is strange. F(r)iction pokes the soft spots, touches nerves most would rather remain protected. F(r)iction is secrets and truths and most importantly - stories. F(r)iction is weird, in every respect.
Tethered By Letters
#40. That's one of the things I like best about folk music is the beautiful melodies - and the harmonies - that exist in it. And of course, some of the stories, the story songs.
Roger McGuinn
#41. There is a story behind every person, a reason why they are the way they are. Don't be quick to judge. Be kind and assume the best.
Nicky Gumbel
#42. You throw the kitchen sink at your early books. You put everything in there. It's like when you meet a new girlfriend or boyfriend, you tell them all your best stories. By the time you have been married for 10 years, they are crying, 'Shut up!'
Mark Billingham
#43. You always want to make the best film you can. If anything I feel more relaxed after the Oscar. I feel like I have a chance to just tell the stories I want to tell and it's actually been really nice.
Morgan Neville
#44. I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.
Adrian Tomine
#45. As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.
Nic Pizzolatto
#46. I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.
Paul Park
#47. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
Bruce Coville
#48. Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.
Nick Flynn
#49. When you're telling a story, the best stories, every character has an arc. Every one. And that arc is usually about finding yourself, or about at least finding something about yourself that you didn't know.
Roy Conli
#50. Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the thirst place.
Seth Godin
#51. Comedic actors can be looked at as a lower form because we have to put ourselves in a lower place than most of the audience. I think lofty emotions are somehow considered more special. The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour.
Jim Carrey
#52. You're a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."
"Beautiful and full of monsters?"
"All the best stories are.
Laini Taylor
#53. Many places in the Bronx seem hidden in shadows, just as the Bronx itself is in Manhattan's shadow. And dark stories develop best in dark shadows.
S.J. Rozan
#54. That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.
Michael Connelly
#55. Now I lay me down to sleep upon my pillow fluffed up so deep my dreams will take me far away to the land all children play when I wake with that new yawn shortly after the new dawn I'll try to have the best day I can until I return to my dream land
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#56. You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what's gone before.
Nancy Kress
#57. What I tell people is be the best version of yourself in anything that you do. You don't have to live anybody else's story.
Stephen Curry
#58. What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It's about community. I also like everything Old Bay.
Barbara Mikulski
#59. The theatre is a world in itself. The possibility for creating experiences that move people is increased many times over. In the end, the best stories are usually about a battle of good over evil - that has never changed.
Cat Stevens
#60. I always want readers to lose themselves completely in a story and feel something, whatever the book invites them to feel. That experience is the best takeaway any book can offer.
Julie Berry
#61. I have to say that it was working with my grandpa, who grew up on a farm in Mountain Home, Idaho, that had the most influence. Witnessing his work ethic and hearing his stories gave me an appreciation for the farm's best lessons.
John Bytheway
#62. I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.
Susan Orlean
#63. Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.
Graydon Carter
#64. My best stories come from well-placed sources who point me in the right direction.
Wolf Blitzer
#65. In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.
Russell Smith
#66. The stories we love best live in us forever.
J.K. Rowling
#67. I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.
Stephen King
#69. I've always loved fairytales, and I've loved the concept of, um, some of the best parts of a lot of stories are the beginning.
Darren Criss
#70. Any story worth telling has been embellished a little bit, Skyco, but the best stories are born from an honest seed that simply grows a little in the retelling of it.
Jennifer Frick-Ruppert
#72. The stories we love best do live in us forever.
J.K. Rowling
#73. I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
Rex Stout
#74. On TV, stories and events are finalized in 30 or 60 minutes, or neatly tied up after a season or two. The best stories are the ones that force us to come to our own conclusions and to explain why we believe in our conclusions.
Lurlene McDaniel
#75. The Gospel, because it is a true story, means all the best stories will be proved, in the ultimate sense, true. THE
Timothy J. Keller
#76. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field.
Jonathan Franzen
#77. I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.
Meg Cabot
#78. I always saw the best reporters as ones you hardly ever saw other than when they were back in the newsroom, writing their stories.
Cheri Bustos
#79. When everyone is catching great waves and out in the line up telling stories and having a laugh, you have the best times. I also get really psyched surfing or running in the rain.
Sally Fitzgibbons
#80. We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.
Daniel Kahneman
#81. You tell the people the stories the best you know. If there is something you don't know, you be up front and make that clear. You always give the aggrieved party the chance to respond before you publish or go to air. That's just my kind of old-fashioned news values.
Wolf Blitzer
#82. Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.
Josh Rose
#83. Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are in which the ending is a surprise.
Nicholas Sparks
#84. Every newspaper in the country covers stories that other newspapers cover. Every industry is filled with people who are competing to do the best job providing a particular service.
Ezra Klein
#85. Your best friend is the person who not only knows all the important stories and events in your life, but has lived through them with you. Your best friend isn't the person you call when you are in jail; mostly likely, she is sitting in the cell beside you.
Irene S. Levine
#86. The best stories, I feel, are those that are self-deprecating and involve some thread of irony.
Penny Reid
#87. I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#88. The best way to understand another person's religion is to listen to the story of what particular practices helped them to deepen and to embody their religion, especially its spirituality.
Thomas Keating
#89. Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.
Michael Sheen
#90. More and more of our finest actors are finding room for themselves in the world of television - but I truly believe it's because some of the best stories are being told there.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan
#91. That was a fine story," I told her, "one of the best that I've ever heard." "I had to live it," she replied, "and it is far better to hear such stories than to live them, I promise you, though it ended so happily.
Gene Wolfe
#92. We are always at our best when compassion enables us to recognize the unique pressures and singular stories of the people on the other side of our conflicts.
Desmond Tutu
#93. In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.
Clive Sinclair
#94. I certainly did my best to bring the story [Anthem] to life in another medium.
Jeff Britting
#95. It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.
Frank Ocean
#97. I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.
Rabih Alameddine
#98. Hire the best talent to tell the story, or the view is great from my hotel.
Komla Dumor
#99. Some of the best stories that I've gotten, that others have written about this administration, about the previous administration, you have to rely on anonymous sources.
Michael Isikoff
#100. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Colum McCann
