Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories. — Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading. — Debbie Reynolds
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies. — L. Sprague de Camp
Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it! — Ben Mikaelsen
Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that? — Félix J. Palma
I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write. — J. K. Rowling
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee
Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent. — Maxim Gorky
Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters. — A. Lee Martinez
We write by the light of every story we have ever read. — Richard Peck
One writer, for instance, excels at a plan or a title page, another works away at the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index. — Oliver Goldsmith
The most important thing is the story. Not the script, but the story. — Richard D. Zanuck
The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer. — Carson Mccullers
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. — Raymond Carver
Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters. — Caroline Leavitt
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. — Karl Kraus
I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators. — Ian Hunter
Top 10 Story Writers Quotes
If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. — Zora Neale Hurston
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better. — V. S. Pritchett
Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin. — Stanley Schmidt
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write. — W. Somerset Maugham
Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Story Writers Image Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
How To Write A Story With Quotes
But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating. — Lawrence Hill
You always have to write script with a budget in mind. Although it's always good to write the big story, you really have to think about how things are going to work as far as cast, effects and settings. It's a process. You have to always think budget and then execute and make it happen. — Harrison Smith
I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write. — Khaled Hosseini
You have the power to say - This is not how my story will end.
With 'The Forty Rules of Love,' I wanted to write a love story. But I wanted a love story with a spiritual dimension. For me, that took me to Rumi. And from Rumi, I went to Shams of Tabriz. That's how the story took shape. — Elif Shafak
It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling. — Roxane Gay
That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing. — Dan Chaon
Behind every girl's favorite song there is an untold story.
When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know? — Charlie Kaufman
I had a very linear story line for this particular play, and I wanted to open the piece up a bit, so I started doing that with my writing. I would describe fragments of scenes on index cards, then move the card around to see how it changed the piece. — Philip Kan Gotanda
Helen Lowe writes wonderful stories, yes, but her work also speaks with lyricism to deeper questions of how we treat each other. With lovely prose that brings vivid life to her characters, she creates a universe with people we care about. This is an author with a gift for fantasy. — Catherine Asaro
I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories. — Elmore Leonard
Write Your Own Story Quotes
If you don't like someone's story, write your own. — Chinua Achebe
If you own this story you get to write the ending. — Brené Brown
People have been telling me I'm a failure and that I'm doing it all wrong for 20 years now. Never trust anybody when they tell you how your story goes. You know your story. You write your own story. — Kevin Smith
One bad chapter does not mean your story is over.
God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards! — Agatha Christie
If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like. — Chinua Achebe
Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story ... The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. — Sayings
Do not judge my story by the chapter you walked in on.
If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story. — Caroline B. Cooney
To name the world in your own terms, to tell your own story, is an act of authority and power. When you write, you are saying, in effect, 'I have a voice. I have a story. This is what I have to say.' — Rebecca McClanahan
I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes. — Anne Rice
Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story. — Miguel Angel Ruiz
Africa’s story has been written by others; we need to own our problems and solutions and write our story. — Paul Kagame
If someone writes a great story, people praise the author, not the pen. People don't say, 'Oh what an incredible pen...where can I get a pen like this so I can write great stories?' Well, I am just a pen in the hands of the Lord. He is the author. All praise should go to him. — Keith Green
You Can, end of story !
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born. — Anne Lamott
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. — Raymond Carver
Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. — Ursula K. Le Guin
I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks. — Maeve Binchy
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. — Octavia Butler
There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place. — Tim Cahill
Fiction Writers Quotes
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one. — Walter Jon Williams
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that. — Kevin J. Anderson
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers — Jacques Barzun
Your past is just a story, and once you realise this, It has not power over you.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists. — Kathy Acker
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention. — Julia Alvarez
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
Story People Quotes
Your life is nothing more than a love story. Between you and God. Nothing more. Every person, every experience, every gift, every loss, every pain is sent to your path for one reason and one reason only: to bring you back to Him. — Yasmin Mogahed
When people walk away from you, let them go. Your destiny is never tied to anyone who leaves you, and it doesn't mean they are bad people. It just means that their part in your story is over. — T. D. Jakes
What I tell people is be the best version of yourself in anything that you do. You don't have to live anybody else's story. — Stephen Curry
You know my name. Not my story.
For me, performing is the biggest part of being a rapper. There's nothing like the feeling of screaming your story to people. — Chance the Rapper
Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the Light. — John Lennox
America is the story of everyday people who did extraordinary things. A story woven deep into the fabric of our society. — Marco Rubio
People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.
You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders. — Ella Baker
For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. — John Winthrop
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. — John Dominic Crossan
The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds. — Dalai Lama
Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. — Ibn Battuta
All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down. — Friedrich Nietzsche
We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie. — Donald Glover
That's what we do, man, we're like storytellers. We tell you stories from the streets. Whether we did it before when we was young or we heard it from one of the homies telling us a tale of what he been through. It's all in having fun and creating a movie like vibe to tell a tale from the streets. — Kurupt
And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. — Alan Rickman
I'm an athlete, I'm funny, I'm creative, I can tell a story, I'm likable. — Logan Paul
I think Hollywood, I think America in general, they love redemption stories. — Logan Paul
With things like 'Dragon Ball,' in the case of fight scenes, I'd take the panel layout across two pages when the book is opened and alter it by angling them, and making them bigger or smaller, to give movement to the panels themselves. — Akira Toriyama
Having a story is what people connect with, but the story alone doesn't allow you to achieve greatness and results. — Lewis Howes
Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing.... Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He. — Saadat Hasan Manto
Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. — Trent Zelazny
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out. — Eudora Welty
I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers. — Matthew Healy
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it. — Harlan Ellison
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story. — Lynn Abbey
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block. When I find myself frozen-whether I'm working on a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book-it's usually because I'm trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or story where it has no place. — Jeffery Deaver
I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most. — Enid Blyton
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. — Stephen King
American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form. — Chester Himes
But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer. — Anne Tyler
Life isn’t happening to you; life is responding to you. Life is your call! Every area of your life is your call. You are the creator of your life. You are the writer of your life story. You are the director of your life movie. You decide what your life will be – by what you give out. — Rhonda Byrne
From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page. — Jacqueline Woodson
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write — Laura Hillenbrand
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. — Alice Munro
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. — Henry David Thoreau
a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in. — Roland Smith
I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth. — David Walliams
I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me. — John Irving
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real. — Arundhati Roy
Story writers say that love is concerned only with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar. How blind they are. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before. — Irving Stone
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.' — Joss Whedon
As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and triumphed matters. For every story that belongs to you, in time, belongs to America. — Andrew Lam
Very few writers understand the complex history and maddening social order of the Mississippi Delta. For Steve Yarbrough, though, it's home turf. He is wickedly observant, funny, cynical, evocative, and he possesses a gift that cannot be taught: he can tell a story. — John Grisham
Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better. — Ernest Hemingway
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. — Willa Cather
All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air. — Jodi Picoult
There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women's stories. God, the BBC's practically run by women. — Julie Walters
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. — Eudora Welty
The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it. — Anne Mccaffrey
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer. — Wole Soyinka
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of story writers quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about story writers to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of story writers quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
