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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"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."
"I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled."
"As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way."
"There's nothing to catch up on. You came, you saw, you scored, you left. End of story."
"I probably get more inspiration for human stories and idiosyncrasies than I do animal stories."
"When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought"
"I am constantly getting letters from inconsistancies in the back stories of these characters."
"And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life-- and the friends who are about me whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence."
"Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination."
"Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories."
"But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky."
"That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever."
"The right story needs the right telling."
"I still like to play games that have a beginning, an end and a story."
"The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story."
"I'll want to hear,' Samuel said. 'I eat stories like grapes."
"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another."
"I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for."
"Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential."
"I have been sent three or four scripts for television series, but there wasn't anything I really wanted to do. I want to tell a good story, whether it's a TV show, a movie, whatever. That's really my No. 1 criteria."
