Writing And Stories Quotes

#1. Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

Tanith Lee

#2. The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality.

Jennifer Aniston

#3. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.

Gita V. Reddy

#4. I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

Steve Earle

#5. 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

#6. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.

Stan D. Jensen

#7. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.

Stephen King

#8. The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

Bob Shacochis

#9. We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.

Arthur Kleinman

#10. Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.

Alden Bell

#11. Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.

Michelle Phan

#12. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

#13. I'm probably the most loquacious author when it comes to my dedications. The reason is there is some symbolism there. I've been writing these books, bringing these stories to my readers who I love so much, and I have a greater love for my family.

Karen Kingsbury

#14. 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

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

A.D. Posey

#16. Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It's a way to find healing, and to healing others.

M. Kirin

#17. I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?

Dorothea Benton Frank

#18. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Eudora Welty

#19. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

Irvin D. Yalom

#20. The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

Nick Earls

#21. One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

Scarlett Thomas

#22. My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

Kumail Nanjiani

#23. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#24. I always write three or four projects at the same time. They're stories that I want to tell, and usually I dump them unfinished for the next one in order not to get too cornered and depressed about it.

Pawel Pawlikowski

#25. First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

Octavia E. Butler

#26. I could write stories; I could hide from the world and make my own instead of trying to change it or live in it. I could make paper people and I would love them too; I could make them almost real.

Ally Condie

#27. It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.

Rob Roberge

#28. Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#29. I am a huge believer in revelations and fun twists.

Darynda Jones

#30. He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

Jennifer Lanthier

#31. I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#32. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

Kim Edwards

#33. I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

Lena Dunham

#34. A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

James Patterson

#35. I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#36. As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house ... Those stories led me to my writing.

Markus Zusak

#37. There was a time when I thought I turned terrible things over in my mind because I read and wrote too many scary stories. (Note self: start writing about unicorns and bunnies)

Patrick Carman

#38. I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that.

Dan Alatorre

#39. Hen, there's such a temptation to just constantly write things that are going to make the fans happy. Sometimes it takes a little bit of unhappiness to make those happy pay-offs work better. That's something that is fascinating to us and I think has really changed the way that stories are told.

Jeff Pinkner

#40. Us writers all like each other and want to write stories with each other; we're having a good time.

Charles Soule

#41. Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head.

Christy Hall

#42. I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

Tamora Pierce

#43. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#44. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

Wole Soyinka

#45. If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

James M. Cain

#46. Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Eudora Welty

#47. Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.

C.K. Webb

#48. Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.
Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

Mary O'Hara

#49. Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

Brenda Ueland

#50. I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

Sherwood Anderson

#51. I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.

Jennifer Fallon

#52. Tonight is the night of telling our stories. You tell three and I four.

Avijeet Das

#53. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,

Alice Munro

#54. I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.

Jazmine Sullivan

#55. The hardest part for me during the creation stage is actually putting words on paper that make sense and tell my story the way I see it. I sometimes feel I am slogging through quicksand when I write.

Linda Conrad

#56. The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

Shannon L. Alder

#57. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

Stephen Graham Jones

#58. Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."

Olga Masters

#59. Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

Sara Sheridan

#60. Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

Josh Rose

#61. I wasn't really a dark kid, but I was in my head a lot. I got good grades all through my 16 years of Catholic school, but I was always writing these weird - and, I have to say, really bad - stories, filled with murder.

Karen Abbott

#62. Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

James Patterson

#63. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Philip Pullman

#64. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Ray Bradbury

#65. I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories.

Damon Lindelof

#66. Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums ... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.

John Green

#67. One of my favorite things to do is to craft and to write songs and tell stories, and another thing is to really just flip out basically, and release kind of my unruly energies.

Eugene Hutz

#68. Those crazy physicists that spend all day cooking themselves under an atomic reactor and all night writing stories for Weird World have done it. Spoiled my day completely. One of those idiots has hung the world up like a celluloid ball in an airstream.

Shirley Jackson

#69. I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.'

Candace Bushnell

#70. I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

Cary Fukunaga

#71. One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Natalie Goldberg

#72. The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.

Marina Warner

#73. I had to find stories no one else was writing, so I got away from the quarterback and the coach. I'm still looking for stories no one else has written.

John Branch

#74. It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

Matt Berninger

#75. 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

#76. My stories were not very good. They didn't have much of a story line, and, in the way of all serious fiction, they ended with the untimely deaths of everyone.

Catherine Lowell

#77. Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#78. I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

Kevin Powers

#79. Have the courage to walk in truth, the strength to love always, and the integrity to never stray away from doing so.

A.D. Posey

#80. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

Robert Cormier

#81. Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story.

Roberta Gellis

#82. We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand.

Troy Hicks

#83. All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.

Sarah Dessen

#84. When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)

Daniel Quinn

#85. Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

Lily King

#86. I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.

Patrick Carman

#87. I have tried to write stories that go into the underworld of myth and bring out life and fire - where the old world looked at a woman alone and immortal and said: she must long to die, I have tried to say: look at her live!

Catherynne M Valente

#88. I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#89. Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly.

Isabel Allende

#90. I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

Jami Attenberg

#91. I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear.

John Sladek

#92. 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

#93. There really is no difference in the actual writing or plotting. I choose to tell different stories for the younger reader and, of course, I would never put sex and extreme violence in a YA book. But writing for adults and children requires the same care and attention.

Michael Scott

#94. If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

W. Somerset Maugham

#95. I see caring for somebody as a creative outlet. I like drawing little faces and writing little stories and hiding them in places. I don't think it's that hard to be thoughtful, especially when you do care about the person.

Channing Tatum

#96. 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

#97. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Arundhati Roy

#98. I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.

Jane Yolen

#99. When I write songs I write for myself ... I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

Patti Scialfa

#100. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood

Katherine Imogene Youngblood