Explore Quotes on Stories

I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else’s story.

Whatever you perceive, you always make a story with yourself as the main character, and that dictates your life. Then when you read 'The Four Agreements', you hear another voice beneath the story, the voice that comes from your integrity, your spirit.

Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.

America is the story of everyday people who did extraordinary things. A story woven deep into the fabric of our society.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

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.

It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.

I always let the characters guide the stories. They really let me know what they want to say and what action they want to happen.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.