Explore Quotes on Stories

The first thing our Chapman screenwriting professors taught us was that all stories share one thing in common: there is a protagonist, and that protagonist has a goal that he or she has difficulty achieving. Does Luke Skywalker become Luke Skywalker if he doesn't get pulled into the Death Star, if his best friend isn't turned into carbonite?

In kindergarten, we'd tell stories with our toys. We'd set a timer for two hours because we knew that was how long a movie was.

The medical genre is beloved, and there are so many great stories to be told - and that's why it's so popular.

I have always connected to stories with characters that don't fit in and have a constant internal battle between their better nature and the darkness within.

One of the things I would like to do is make up stories that I would have enjoyed when I was a kid. So, if I'm thinking about an audience, it's usually a younger version of myself.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

Some of the best news stories start in gossip. Monica Lewinsky certainly was gossip in the beginning. I had heard it months before I printed it.

I've written thousands of stories, started hundreds of news cycles.

I don't care about the size of the roles, or how they're marketed or billed or anything like that. I would love to be a part of stories that tell us about where we've come from, where we are, where we're going - with great directors.

We all hate those stories that end with 'And that's the story.'

Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

I feel very privileged that I get to spend my life telling stories that mean something to people.

A military childhood in the 1950s was very much informed by WWII. My brothers and I often heard stories from our dad - and from other kids - about things that had happened to their dads. We constantly played war games and, nearly every Saturday, saw a different WWII movie at the post theater.

When I was five, we moved to Virginia and lived inside an old fort that was surrounded by a moat. So when I heard stories of American history, I felt as if those dramas were taking place right in my own backyard.

I get ideas from my own personal experiences, from my imagination, and from my research and from old stories.

Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.

Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.

I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we've lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise.

There have been many times when we have not run stories because we cannot get it verified.