Top 100 Writing Story Quotes
#1. I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs to see how he works. I've gotten into writing story-songs.
Scott Weiland
#2. Accept nothing. Challenge everything.
A.D. Posey
#3. Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.
Bonnie Friedman
#4. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#5. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.
Gwenda Bond
#6. Don't look.
See.
Don't think.
Feel.
Don't hear.
Listen.
Pay attention
Miracles really do happen every day
A.D. Posey
#7. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.
A.D. Posey
#8. The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.
Shandy L. Kurth
#9. Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter
#10. Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.
Norman Lock
#11. The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.
Mary E. Pearson
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#15. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.
Elmore Leonard
#16. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.
Airam
#17. It's always more than just a story.
A.D. Posey
#18. 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
#19. It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.
A.D. Posey
#20. Writing the opening lines of a story is a bit like starting to ski at the steepest part of a hill. You must have all your skills under control from the first instant.
Marion Dane Bauer
#21. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Charles Baxter
#22. Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.
Ellen Hopkins
#23. We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#24. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#25. Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.
John Truby
#26. The more of those little light bulbs that can turn on the better. Eventually you'll have enough to light up a movie screen.
A.D. Posey
#27. Forget about writing to Penthouse.
This one was going to be a story for their grandkids.
Suzanne Brockmann
#28. MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All
REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time
Lisa Cron
#29. 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
#30. A story only wants to be told. Don't stand in its way.
Aleks Canard
#31. Let your story breathe and be what it really is.
A.D. Posey
#32. 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
#33. Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.
Rich Sommer
#34. With the right tools, you can write anything ...
Jeff Lyons
#35. God is writing His story on the pages of our lives.
Rick Anderson
#36. If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.
Richard Price
#37. If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.
Michael Winter
#38. If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.
Dashiell Hammett
#39. God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!
Agatha Christie
#40. 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
#41. The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.
Raymond Chandler
#42. When I write a story, I have no idea what I'm doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you're irresponsible - it's a very liberating place.
Etgar Keret
#43. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#44. 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
#46. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
David Bergen
#47. When we are in love, we are convinced nobody else will do. But as time goes, others do do, and often do do, much much better.
Coco J. Ginger
#48. It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated
Ray Bradbury
#49. My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.
Roger Zelazny
#50. The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.
Iris Johansen
#51. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.
A.D. Posey
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.
Staceyann Chin
#55. Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell.
Tahereh Mafi
#57. Writing a story no one else dares to say, sits outside my comfort zone, is one of the biggest challenges I'm facing as an author.
Veronica Purcell
#58. What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier.
Kiefer Sutherland
#59. Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.
Ashly Lorenzana
#60. Voice really depends on the answer to the question, Who is telling this story? ... That will color your diction-and determine your metaphors, your sensibility.
Philip Gerard
#61. Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.
Don Roff
#62. I knew now there was no such thing as a biblioblackhole.
Everything written truly lived.
Every real word. Every real story.
You had to find your words. You had to find your story.
Tarun J. Tejpal
#63. I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.
Steve Capus
#64. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#65. What's fun about the story development at Pixar is it's a journey. You don't just write a script and then that's the movie you make. It's just constant evolution and being open to that and that collaboration with the voice actors and with the artists and animators at Pixar.
John Lasseter
#66. What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.
Stephen King
#67. There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.
Kate Inglis
#68. Writing a story is like going down a path in the woods. You follow the path. You don't worry about getting lost. You just go.
Jan Brett
#69. Only write a story that only you can write.
Alysha Speer
#70. I'm writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?
Nicholas Sparks
#71. The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.
Janet Fitch
#72. I don't know what gives me more pleasure: watching my story unfold or going in and watching a room full of black people talking for me and writing words for black people.
Lee Daniels
#73. The original Zal story by Ferdowsi gives a very moving account of an infant who had all odds against him - he was left to die in the wilderness and a giant, benevolent bird rescued him and became his guardian angel. This tale thrilled me; I've always wanted to write about it.
Porochista Khakpour
#74. Make up a story ... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Toni Morrison
#75. We started writing the shows in order, and then very quickly had to jump to, "Oh, we got Tony Hale today and Jessica [Walter." We've got to jump ahead and write that stuff that's in Jessica's show. Fortunately, we knew the story, but it was challenging.
Mitchell Hurwitz
#76. The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
Elizabeth Bowen
#77. Always let life be wild. Forever have life be interesting.
A.D. Posey
#78. The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.
N. T. Wright
#79. When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.
David Gerrold
#80. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
Kevin Barry
#81. If you're going to have a complicated story, you must work to a map; otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#82. The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.
Gail Caldwell
#83. As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .
J.R.R. Tolkien
#84. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
Philip Pullman
#85. I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
Chester Himes
#86. You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
Sara Sheridan
#87. Every story began with the same claim: If you hear the first part, you'll want to hear the second. If you hear the story today, you'll come back tomorrow for another. If you hear the story tonight, you'll think about it as you sleep.
Donna Jo Napoli
#88. Africa's story has been written by others; we need to own our problems and solutions and write our story.
Paul Kagame
#89. I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
Ernest Hemingway,
#90. Writing a story is like giving birth with the only difference that you enjoy the process.
Self
#91. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
Hilary Mantel
#92. I can't conceive of nursing babies and taking care of children and writing, too. I know there are writers that do that, but I'm too single-minded. I can't stand to be interrupted, whether I'm writing a story or dressing a child.
Ellen Gilchrist
#93. Improvise. Write your own damn story.
Eric Lange
#94. I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
Wilkie Collins
#95. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story
Chuck Wendig
#96. Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
Alan Lightman
#97. Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
Ernest Hemingway,
#98. Write truthfully, write from the heart, and your words will live.
A.D. Posey
#99. Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.
Stephen King
#100. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky ... more will want to do the former than the latter.
Stephen King
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