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
Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories. — Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
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
That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading. — Debbie Reynolds
Writing a story is like going down a path in the woods. You follow the path. You don't worry about getting lost. You just go. — Jan Brett
Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. — Ray Bradbury
We write by the light of every story we have ever read. — Richard Peck
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
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
The most important story we'll ever write in life is our own-not with ink, but with our daily choices. — Richard Paul Evans
If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. — Barry Lopez
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
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story. — Roberta Gellis
Short Writing Stories Quotes
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. — Raymond Chandler
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
It's all about one thing: creative problem-solving to get the story out. — Robert Greenberg
To survive, you must tell stories. — Umberto Eco
The most important thing is the story. Not the script, but the story. — Richard D. Zanuck
Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today. — Robert McKee
Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today. — Robert McAfee Brown
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money. — J. P. Donleavy
Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them. — Allan Gurganus
Africa’s story has been written by others; we need to own our problems and solutions and write our story. — Paul Kagame
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
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
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
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing! — Sadegh Hedayat
We are writing stories with light and darkness, motion and colors. It is a language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings. — Vittorio Storaro
Writing Stories Image Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
Story Writer 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
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
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
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
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
Your life is your story. Write well. Edit often.
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
Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
Story To Tell Quotes
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
I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way. — Ida B. Wells
Life begins at 40 - but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times. — Helen Rowland
A good friend knows all your stories. A best friend helped you write them.
Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times. — William Feather
Try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story — Saul Bass
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
When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen
Africa's risks are mainly perceived and not real. Unfortunately for us in Africa we are not really very good at telling our own story. But things are changing and people are beginning to understand that things are going very, very well. — Aliko Dangote
But how could you live and have no story to tell? — Fyodor Dostoevsky
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 was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories. — Hedy Lamarr
Reading Stories Quotes
Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success. — Abdul Kalam
We take it for granted we know the whole story - We judge a book by its cover and read what we want between selected lines. — Axl Rose
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters. — George Eliot
Write at the edges of the day.
I'd like to do the young cadet thing again for sure, but that's why I wanted to do this, to see if I could do it. I took the scenes out of the script and put them together and read them as one little arc, story and that seemed to work. — Scott Speedman
So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It’s time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze. — Dan B. Allender
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. — Lynn Abbey
When writing the story of your life. Don't let anyone else hold the pen.
Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog. — Philip Yancey
As the child approaches a new text he is entitled to an introduction so that when he reads, the gist of the... story can provide some guide for a fluent reading. — Marie Clay
I loved ghost stories, creaky staircases, stormy nights. If it guaranteed nightmares I read it by flashlight, after midnight. — Lisa Gardner
I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. — Leslie Marmon Silko
Inventing Stories Quotes
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks. — Benjamin Zander
My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones. — Wole Soyinka
One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect. — Charles Eisenstein
When writing the story of your life. Dont let anyone else hold the pen.
The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean. — Toni Morrison
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? — Thomas Hardy
I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories. — Josef Koudelka
If you don't like someones story, write your own.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. — Vladimir Nabokov
In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism. — Philippe Starck
Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded. — Siri Hustvedt
I was always inventing characters and making up stories. — Suzanne Vega
Despite all the technical improvements, it still boils down to a man or a woman and a microphone, playing music, sharing stories, talking about issues -- communicating with an audience. — Casey Kasem
It's important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story, you free yourself and give other people permission to acknowledge their own story — Iyanla Vanzant
While every refugee's story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage - the courage not only to survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives. — Antonio Guterres
ONE OF THE GREATEST EXPERIENCES IN LIFE IS ACHIEVING PERSONAL GOALS THAT OTHERS SAID WOULD BE, 'IMPOSSIBLE TO ATTAIN.' BE PROUD OF YOUR SUCCESS AND SHARE YOUR STORY WITH OTHERS. — Robert Cheeke
Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you. — Shannon Alder
I've received a lot of positive feedback from both the secular and Christian markets. People seem to be receiving it with open arms and hearts, and are interested in the stories I want to share about my relationship with God and my faith. — Brian Littrell
Successful people often enjoy telling their story. — Lewis Howes
Gender has always been considered a fact immutable. But we now know it's actually more fluid, complex, and mysterious. Because of my success, I never have the courage to share my story. Not because I thought what I am is wrong but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. — Geena Rocero
Exercise your purchasing power as a consumer, volunteer and bring joy to those in need, and share your experiences, tell your stories, and inspire others along the way. — Blake Mycoskie
Teaching Writing Quotes
Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic. — Eric Allin Cornell
I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight. — Venerable Bede
You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be. — Mario Vargas Llosa
It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words. — Anthony Doerr
James Franco, acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing - is there anything you can do? — Natasha Leggero
Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers. — Kelly Gallagher
It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest. — Barry Mann
Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market. — John Taylor Gatto
If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach. — Mem Fox
Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction. — LeCrae
I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. — Martin Amis
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. — Umberto Eco
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it. — Jean M. Auel
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Frederik Pohl
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined. — Paolo Bacigalupi
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. — Ulysses S. Grant
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 Quotes
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 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
Writing Life Quotes
We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people's lives and makes things a little easier. That's what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don't want to close the door on hope. — Merle Haggard
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing. — Richard P. Feynman
If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. — Michel Foucault
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho
I write ... in order to help ensure that the teeming millions in the New World, for whose sins Christ gave His life, do not continue to die in ignorance, but rather are brought to knowledge of God and thereby saved. — Bartolome de las Casas
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. — Victor Hugo
I am the author of my life. Unfortunately, I am writing in pen and can’t erase my mistakes. — Bill Kaulitz
To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard. — Allen Ginsberg
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
I think that every decision I make in my life is based off of an emotion - and it definitely hurts me in some situations, and helps in some situations, like obviously writing and stuff is my favourite thing to do because I get to use all of my emotions and express them in that way. — Melanie Martinez
Writing Words Quotes
Words are the most powerful thing in the universe... Words are containers. They contain faith, or fear, and they produce after their kind. — Charles Capps
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. — James A. Michener
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. — Aldous Huxley
Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes. — Cole Porter
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired. — Lucille Clifton
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. — Jack Kerouac
I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise. — Richard Brautigan
When you write a song, most of the words you use are in black and white, and then, from time to time, you use one that’s in color. These words in color are a part of ourselves, because we give them a meaning. If you like, we give them a third dimension. — Jacques Brel
I can’t write five words but that I change seven. — Dorothy Parker
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length. — Carl Friedrich Gauss
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
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 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
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
I worked on 'Blue Peter' and 'Tonight' and lots of TV plays, filmed people like Rudolf Nureyev and Ted Heath, and ended up a senior cameraman with my own crew. I'd had my first short story published in 1947, and when my writing really started to take off I decided to go freelance, and eventually left the BBC in 1965. — Michael Bond
People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don't know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione. — J. K. Rowling
The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. — Chris Van Allsburg
Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. — Kurt Vonnegut
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. — John M. Barrie
I used to be an editor and I was editing young adult series. I didn't really like the books that I was reading, so I decided that I would write a book about something I'd want to read if I was 16. It turned into a Cinderella story... I developed a proposal and the characters of 'Gossip Girl' for my job. — Cecily von Ziegesar
Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder. — Tom Waits
I am much more involved in the filmmaking experience on Mag Seven. I'm much more involved in story elements, casting decisions, the writing of the show, the blocking of the scenes. — Michael Biehn
When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going. — James Frey
You write your life story by the choices you make. — Helen Mirren
Let me tell you how the story ends, where the good guys die and the bad guys win. It doesn't matter how many friend you make, but the graffite they write on your grave. — Gerard Way
Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character. — Tabitha King
The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood. — Malcolm Cowley
The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation. — Larry Niven
Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us. — Susan Wittig Albert
I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story. — Pam Houston
The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it. — Mary E. Pearson
I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands. — O. Henry
If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages. — William Campbell Gault
Everything that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story. — Tapani Bagge
Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story. — Brian Keene
In Conclusion
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