Story Quotes

You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir,
behind the ghost on the links,
behind the lady who dances
and the man who madly drinks,
under the look of fatigue
the attack of migraine and the sigh
there is always another story,
there is more than meets the eye.

This part of him might be only a grain of sand in an ocean of more interesting and wonderful things that made him who he was, but I still feel like it should be noted. Because, for a moment in time, he was one of us. It was not an act, and we loved him for it.

...people like Adam live 100 lives inthe span of time it takes most of us to live just one. When they go, they leave behind a lot of stories. You can't just tell the big ones. You have to tell them all, even the little stories that don't seem to mean much of anything, because details are the breadcrumb trails we follow when we're trying to find our way back to the people we've lost.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

Opening your imagination to the ridiculous opens your mind to what you’re not otherwise seeing. In other words, it makes room for the genius to come through.

A structural approach to screenwriting requires patience and discipline, but the rewards are great. You might find if you spend three weeks hammering out your story, the actual screenwriting will take only a week.

Think of story as the plan and screenplay as the execution. A screenplay is a story told in scenes, each scene necessary to tell the story. At this stage you’re just testing if each scene is necessary. When planning a screenplay, I try to write the story in prose first, without dialog, with each scene represented by either a sentence or a paragraph. Then I read and revise the condensed story, omitting what is unnecessary.

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Break the rules to find new ways to tell stories.

I feel like games are reaching a point where storytelling is better than TV and movies. You can live the novel.

Every night in the winter it starts the same. Uncle David and Nels will fill their lower lips and Father will carve and Mother will knit and the yellow flames will make our faces burn, and then Uncle David will spit in the coffee can and rub his hands on his legs and take a breath and say: “It was when I was young…..” Then he will tell the story.

I always liked the story of Noah’s Ark and the idea of starting anew by rescuing the things you like and leaving the rest behind.

There are always three sides to every story: your side, the other side, and the truth.

All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged — after all, what’s good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it’s a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.