Quotes on Stories

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

There is in India a story of a dying youth who, hearing the sobs of grief around him, cried: Insult me not with your cries of sympathy. When I soar to the land of eternal light and love; it is I who should feel for you. For me, disease, shattering of bones, sorrow, excruciating heartaches no more. I dream joy, I glide in joy, I breathe in joy evermore.

Though "Veer-Zaara" is a film about cross-border love, there isn't a word of politics in it. Forget politics, there isn't slap, not even a raised voice in "Veer-Zaara"(2004). It's a very intense, humane and emotional story. "Veer-Zaara" (2004) is a humble tribute to my home in Punjab. It's my tribute to the one-ness of people on both sides of the border. Every religion preaches peace. Then why the bloodshed for the sake of religion? Why are we destroying each other?.

Each one of us needs time and space for recollection, meditation and calmness.... Thanks be to God that this is so! In fact, this need tells us that we are not made for work alone, but also to think, to reflect or even simply to follow with our minds and our hearts a tale, a story in which to immerse ourselves, in a certain sense to lose ourselves to find ourselves subsequently enriched.

Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.

We're going in the wrong direction and I think the only way to counter that is to bring the story home in really concrete ways to people - in ways that kids can understand and non-scientists can understand.

As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

I wouldn't trade anything for my story now.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.