Quotes About Stories

I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.

Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn't mean that those stories can't be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter.

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

Just recognizing and naming that many of the things we treat as historical fact are stories can help erode their power over our sense of identity and thinking. If they are stories rather than "truth," we can write new stories that better represent the country we aspire to be. Our new stories can be about diverse people working together to overcome challenges and make life better for all, about figuring out how to live sustainably on this one planet we share, and on deep respect for cooperation, fairness, and equity instead of promoting hyper-competitive individualism.

I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably... in the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today.

There are stories we take on from our culture, and there are stories based on our own personal history. Some of those stories lock us in limiting beliefs and lead to suffering, and there are others that can move us toward freedom.

There's a lot of great writing, and characters, and stories being told in television nowadays. And much more than there used to be. The opportunities to tell stories, because of the opportunities to show content. And so it's drawing actors from cinema, movie actors, actors to where there's a lot of opportunities to where you can tell stories.

I think it's why we're able to look at with comic book stories or origin stories, why is it that we can keep retelling these stories over and over? And hopefully it's because it hits something so universal and so primal inside of us that we actually yearn for that same story over and over. But toned and different form, and updated and modernized, and I can go into the specifics.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Everyone likes to tell stories. And gossip is, of course, even more exciting, if you know the people. But if the gossip's about yourself, it's very weird. They once wrote about me that I had been clubbing with some guys. At the moment I'm a victim and that hurts because it's not me who does something like that. Such stories are just unfair.

Some of the most amazing stories are happening on the global scene. My extraordinary producing partner, Joslyn Barnes, she's just virtually changed my life with the way she constructed this company and how we go about telling the stories we want to tell.

I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.

One of the remarkable qualities of the story is that it creates space. We can dwell in a story, walk around, find our own place. The story confronts but does not oppress; the story inspires but does not manipulate. The story invites us to an encounter, a dialogue, a mutual sharing. As long as we have stories to tell to each other there is hope. As long as we can remind each other of the lives of men and women in whom the love of God becomes manifest, there is reason to move forward to new land in which new stories are hidden.

History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.

I would also suggest that any aspiring writer begin with short stories. These days, I meet far too many young writers who try to start off with a novel right off, or a trilogy, or even a nine-book series. That's like starting in at rock climbing by tackling Mt. Everest. Short stories help you learn your craft.

We know people by their stories: their history, their habits, their secrets, their triumphs and failures. We know them by what they do. We want to know mountains too, but they’ve got no story. So we do the next best thing. We throw ourselves onto them and make the stories happen.

She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

I'm glad people see some of the stories that way. I see where they're coming from, although none of the stories are specifically intended to arouse. There is a gender divide on the short story "The Girlfriend Game" - women seem to consider it "sexy" but men usually find it uncomfortable.

And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

If you're a writer you know that the stories don't come to you, you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

Shakespeare's stories are still very strong. He structured fantastic stories about things that were fundamental to the human being and psyche.

Those stories weren't being written at all - stories about women's inner lives and outer activism. We've come miles and miles, but we still don't have an equal rights amendment yet. We don't have equal pay yet. There's a lot of blind misogyny that's not personal, but institutionalized. We still have work to do, but even just looking at those old Ms. Magazines is a cool thing to do - to see how daring they were. They just went right into the belly of the beast.

My favorite thing in the world is telling stories, and most of what I do is telling stories through music.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

I would say try to tell stories that you care about as opposed to stories that you think will sell.

Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.

What we have here is a rousing boy's adventure story, adapted from stories that Edgar Rice Burroughs cranked out for early pulp magazines. They lacked the visceral appeal of his Tarzan stories, which inspired an estimated 89 movies; amazingly, this is the first John Carter movie, but it is intended to foster a franchise and will probably succeed.

The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.

Many stories are invented about me - too many stories; almost everyone uses me, and I'd say about 0.01 percent of the gossip is true.

And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.

We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.

Comic book characters are characters who wear costumes. They're not necessarily different than other characters. The trend I think that you're seeing are comic book movies, at least the ones that Marvel makes, don't have comic book stories. They have dramatic human stories.

Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.

When I was in Boy Scouts, back in the day, we'd tell stories around the campfire. That's why I love movies. It's literally you and your friends, telling stories around a campfire, whatever they may be.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

Fairy tales to me are never happy, sweet stories. They're moral stories about overcoming the dark side and the bad.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

Supernatural hasn't spent a lot of time on relationship stories, and this is a really nice mechanism to do that without imposing that on the forward momentum of these other stories that we're telling. In the writers' room we tend to say, "We're never going to be able to give a hell or Purgatory as good as people's imaginations," so the instinct is normally not to go there. But, we went the other way this year and said, "We are going to go there," because there's a really, really strong character thing going on down there.

I love telling stories; I always have, and I think women need to be more proactive about telling their own stories and sharing their points of view. So that's definitely a goal for me.

I need to keep my story count high. I'm trying to get as many stories in my hour as is humanly possible. We're telling more stories in our hour than any national newscast has in the history of this business, I think.