Quotes About Stories

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

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, we all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do. We find ourselves in them, make ourselves in them, choose ourselves in them. If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we had better choose them well.

The only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different- you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency.

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.

There are tons of stories out there. I read a lot of scripts on a weekly basis. I'm looking for stories to tell and stories that I hope will be interesting to an audience.

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.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Yet again, an ancient answer echoes across the centuries: Listen! Listen to stories! For what stories do, above all else, is hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves. Stories are mirrors of human be-ing, reflecting back our very essence. In a story, we come to know precisely the both/and, mixed-upped-ness of our very being. In the mirror of another's story, we can discover our tragedy and our comedy-and therefore our very human-ness, the ambiguity and incongruity, that lie at the core of the human condition.

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

People need stories...we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books.

I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

What's neat about TV is you get really rich, an opportunity to tell really rich stories over the course of 20 hours. Film is cool because it's an hour and a half to two hours. You go on an adventure and by the end it's all cleaned up. Maybe in a franchise you have three chapters of a great story but in TV you can really get deep. You have more time to tell stories so I would definitely not rule out doing television in the future because I think it's a great medium for telling stories.

There's so many ways to be a voice and that's what I'm figuring out. Being an artist, being an actor, it's about telling stories that could heal, that could open up discussion that could make the community better. There are many (Latino) stories that need to be told and haven't been told right. If I could help be that voice then that's what I'm going to do, because this is a reality for me.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

Most of the stories I have go downhill quickly. In all honesty most of the good stories I have, no one else would think is funny.

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

I probably get more inspiration for human stories and idiosyncrasies than I do animal stories.

For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

I constantly think as an artist, as a rapper of what are the stories you want to tell? They can't all be, "I'm ill, I'm fresh, look at me, I have money." At some point, when you have an audience for it, there are stories that need to be told.

The best stories are universal stories that have been told for as long as humanity has existed it's just figuring out new ways to do it, with language, with structure. And so I'm always trying to do that.

[Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.

Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.

My stories were translated and had many reviews before I had an interview with any international or Arab newspaper. If the stories hadn't succeeded, you wouldn't have asked me my position on Arab festivals and I wouldn't have been interested in the festivals anyway, because I would be in seclusion, writing.

All the charm of the angler's life would be lost but for these hours of thought and memory. All along the brook, all day on lake or river, while he takes his sport, he thinks. All the long evenings in camp, or cottage, or inn, he tells stories of his own life, hears stories of his friend's lives, and if alone calls up the magic of memory.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

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.

We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices.

I am really inspired by strong, badass, female characters. I would start with a revenge film, then ease into stories of badass everyday woman who make a difference in their own life for the better of people and environment around them. Stories of self realization.

So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

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.

Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.

I asked my mum, who's a very clever psychotherapist, and she says that kids love stories about death; they need it, they need to have stories that deal with death and explain it, as a place to put their fears.

I dont go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.

I write because the lives of all of us are stories. If enough of those stories are told, then perhaps we will begin to see that our lives are the same story. The differences are merely in the details.

Maybe more than a teller, I am a story listener. I really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind. All of my films are a collection of small stories that have been told to me.

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.

I've talked with people of stature-of military and government credentials and position-and heard their stories, and their desire to tell their stories openly to the public. And that got my attention very, very rapidly.... The first hand experiences of these credible witnesses that, now in advanced years are anxious to tell their story, we can't deny that, and the evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident, and that indeed an alien craft did crash, and that material was recovered from that crash site.

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

Who are the executives, and what are the stories that are being released? Not just in movie theaters but online. When you watch Master of None, you're like, yes, this is real life to me. These are refreshing types of stories.

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.