Stories quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside stories — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories."
"I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message."
"A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself."
"My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible."
"But you speak of Master Gandalf, as if he was in a story that had come to an end.' 'Yes, we do,' said Pippin sadly. 'The story seems to be going on, but I am afraid Gandalf has fallen out of it."
"Hollywood is obsessed with police stories."
"Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen."
"If you really listen to my music my music is more like stories than party records. I never made party records."
"Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown."
"Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat."
"My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful."
"The story of practically every great fortune starts with the day when a creator of ideas and a seller of ideas got together and worked in harmony."
"If you read, your book is kind of your friend, because it's like the book is telling you its story and you're being the listener."
"I think there is having a behavior that is disrespectful to women that goes unchecked, where your manhood is defined by sexual conquests, where you trade stories with your friends and no one checks anyone. At 19, that was normal."
"The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music."
"Holidays have been commercialized. It has become about material things. But the holidays are about sharing stories and being in each others presence."
"There is an incredible film, 42. It's the incredible story of Jackie Robinson. I have extolled the virtues of this movie to everyone I meet. I've given quotes to everyone I talk to."
"In fact, I don't even know myself. That is the big secret of the story. That there is no story."
"I make such big efforts to forget things and I can't tell the story of my life because, thank God, I'm still living it."
"That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor."
