Quotes on Stories

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: 'When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?'

I really haven't had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I'd rather tell a story about somebody else.

I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same.

Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness.

In few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story.

Islam has always been a part of America’s story.... And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.

You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders.

On acting to daughter Isabella Rossellini: Keep it simple. Make a blank face and the music and the story will fill it in.

Dear Sir: Yours of the 24th. asking 'the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law' is received. The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's Pleading, Greenleaf's Evidence, & Story's Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

There wasn't much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

If we think that this life is all there is to life, then there is no interpretation of our problems, our pain, not even of our privileges. But everything changes when we open up to the possibility that God's story is really our story too.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?