Quotes on Stories

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 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.

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

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

Every cuisine tells a story. Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds. It lives in people's minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes and represents.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

For Hell and the foul fiend that rules_x000D_ God's everlasting fiery jails_x000D_ (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),_x000D_ With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,_x000D_ Are senseless stories, idle tales,_x000D_ Dreams, whimseys, and no more.

The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past.

Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Pay attention to everything in the world as if it's alive. Realize everything has its own discrete existence outside your story. By doing this, you open to gifts and lessons that the world has to give you.

In a way, humans are not made of skin and bones as such, as we're made of stories.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.

Tell your story with your whole heart.

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

The stories that you tell yourself can make or break you - no matter who you are.