"I'm just corny enough to like to have a story hit me over the heart."
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Stories quotes
Stories
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Stories quotes (page 28 of 332)
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"Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash."
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"But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says."
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"Some of those stories in local newspapers are just as dull and boring as the stories that I get from on-line services, which are basically sort of straight news."
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"Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche."
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"Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories."
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"I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go."
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"My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots."
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"Any carefully planned thing destroys the creativity. You can't think your way through a story; you have to live it. So, you don't build a story; you allow it to explode."
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"There is only one type of story in the world-your story."
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"A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery."
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"You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!"
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"The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars."
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"Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature."
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"I value humor, kindness, and the ability to tell a good story far more than money, status, or the kind of car someone drives."
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"When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof!"
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"Really I'm a fan of any movie, whether it's suspense, action, or comedy, anything that has a good story."
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"He wants to put his story next to hers."
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"A good leader shares information, even if they don't know the whole story. Without any information, people create their own, which causes fear and paranoia."
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"If everything goes right, we get a good experience. If everything goes wrong, we get a good story."
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