If you did not know at age five that the gods are made up beings and the myths made up stories, you are a fool.
— Suetonius
Professional Made Up Stories quotations
Last year I picked up the New York Times and there was a story about a kid from Dartmouth who was bragging that he never left his room, and made dates and ordered pizza with his computer. The piece de resistance of this story was that he had two roommates, and he was proud of the fact that he only talked to them by computer.

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward.
A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories.
And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.
I've thought a lot about the power of empathy.
In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.
I first studied to be a preacher, but decided that I was too prone to tell big stories. Then I studied Blackstone for a while and soon learned that I was not adept enough at prevarication to make a successful lawyer. I then made up my mind that I would seek some field where I could tell big stories and tell the truth.

The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.
We must risk the journey to a higher ground where there is freedom from the gravitational pull of our stories, the pull that comes from years of trying to prove that the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we've made up, are the truth.
There are two kinds of people in this world.
Those who want to know the facts, and those who want to make up a nice story to feel better. I wish I was the kind who made up stories.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.
A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it.
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Every story was being made up. My true friends weren't the ones speaking. It was people who never knew me, making up stories. Even my local paper put a $1,000 bounty out for information about my whereabouts.
I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them.
They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.
I made a terrible mistake. I got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children. I love my children. I was holding my son tight. Why would I throw a baby off the balcony? That's the dumbest, stupidest story I ever heard.

Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.
Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
That's the trouble with a story spinner.
You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

For me, writing something down was the only road out.
..I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.
This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths – just because they can't think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself.
Billions of dollars of grant money [over $50 billion] are flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story.

I get some of my ideas from watching my three daughters, but most of them come from my own memories of growing up. I can remember how romantic I was, not just about love, but romance in the classic sense - the romantic ideals: of honor and truth, of loyalty, sacrifice and fairness. Those were the elements that made a story satisfying to me.
I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father.
He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
Yeah, we've become really good friends.
Our characters start dating in the book, and um, yeah, I think we - and we made up little back stories to our characters and little outtakes that we'd bring up to Edgar as a joke, and you know, kind of see different sides of stuff. So yeah, we have a really good time.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.

I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn't read the words, so I made up my own stories.
So many of my songs are based on things that either happened to me or to someone I know, but there are also ones where I've written a made-up story. All of them are about very real emotions, and I just find different ways to express them.
I am greedy for both Hollywood and Bollywood.
For me, Bollywood is not new, as it is something that I grow up on... I know the plot... stories and characters that are written and made. I haven't got the right opportunity to show my work in Bollywood.

It's a challenge to express real life in dramatic terms.
In an entirely "made-up" story, you are sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities.
I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.
I always thought everybody made up stories in their heads - never thought about actually writing them down on paper until I was snowed in with the kids in the blizzard of '79 - 3 feet of snow. I live in a rural area and was stuck. No morning kindergarten - it was a nightmare.
Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire James Comey, knowing there was no good time to do it. And, in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.
Drug addiction is an incredibly difficult challenge to manage on one's own.
When I think of all the stories I've heard from people, the common denominator is that they all were ultimately able to find somebody who was willing to support them. Maybe it was someone they knew, like a parent or a sibling or a friend; other times it was a treatment center with a compassionate staff who didn't give up on them. That made all the difference.