Explore Quotes on Stories

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

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

And at that point, I think my experience in covering the subject helped me. I think editors felt comfortable with the idea of me telling this story because I had demonstrated that I know this business pretty well

Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it

While it's really hard to do, at the same time, I'm escaping my body, which I really want to do. I'm living someone else's life. I get very intensely into the story, into the interviews and the research. I'm experiencing things along with my subjects. I have a freedom I don't have in my physical life

But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story

The author tells a story wherein a missionary friend of his was invited by unbelievers on a train ride to play cards. The friend declined, saying that he did not bring his hands with him. He explained to the astonished group that the hands attached to what they saw as his body belonged to the Lord, and he was thereby able to explain the Gospel.

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections - not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences.

The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.

There just isn’t a weak season of 'Breaking Bad.' There’s just superior work, a sprint toward evil that turned into a marathon. But like all big-talker shows that bring their heavy cargo in for a rough and breathlessly observed landing, 'Breaking Bad' didn’t quite leave itself enough runway to satisfactorily end some of its better story lines, especially once the chronology gap closed up between the flash-forwards from last year’s episodes and Sunday night’s conclusion. One could easily argue that there was just too much left to do in this one episode.

My goal was to show the history of the end of the Cold War through both sides - the U.S. side and the Soviet side. I really felt that especially the Soviet side of the story hadn't been well told because we didn't know.

This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.

My life is kinda like a story that if I told you about it, you probably wouldn't believe. It would seem like fiction. That's me.

As the Hindu gods are 'immortal' only in a very particular sense - for they had born and they die - they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details... and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beigns by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human beign, however 'archetypal' his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are masks behind which we see our own faces.

When I first went to New York I was right out of high school, I was 17 years old, and I had never seen a building over two stories high.

To me, the Sherlock Holmes stories are about a great friendship. Without Watson, Holmes might well have burnt out on cocaine long ago. I hope the series shows how important friendship is.

I've done 33 Sherlock Holmes stories and bits of them are all right. But the definitive Sherlock Holmes is really in everyone's head. No actor can fit into that category because every reader has his own ideal.

SHADOW KNIGHT'S MATE is a compelling story, extremely well-written and alarmingly plausible. Jay Brandon does for politics what Dan Brown did for religion.

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.