Quotes on Stories

When you look at the whole package of energy, the food you eat should match the story you want to live, which means: as fresh as possible, without dullness, repetition, and routine. As colorful as possible, giving delight to the eyes; food is a rainbow brought down to earth. As cheerful as possible, maximizing moments of happiness and pleasure.

My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

The best stories come out of the truth.

I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.

Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Each human being, however small or weak, has something to bring to humanity. As we start to really get to know others, as we begin to listen to each other's stories, things begin to change. We begin the movement from exclusion to inclusion, from fear to trust, from closedness to openness, from judgment and prejudice to forgiveness and understanding. It is a movement of the heart.

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

Human beings are complicated and flawed and unique, but we all have a story to tell. Gone are the days where our lead characters can only look like somebody else. Heroes look like all of us. We see ourselves in each others' stories. We see who we are. We see who we want to be. Sometimes we see who we don't want to be. And through that we have a greater understanding of ourselves and acceptance of each other.

We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

The essence of practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.

I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.