Quotes on Stories

I enjoy making people laugh. The trick is to tell them jokes against yourself. If you praise yourself, your stories aren't funny.

Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.

We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.

It all comes from the mind. I've seen the most incredible success stories because a person had a dream and it was so powerful no one could touch it. He'd feel it, believe it, think about it all day and night. That would inspire him to do things necessary to get the results he wanted.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

In other words Luke's story is historically impossible and internally inconsistent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah's prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus in his fictitious drama._x000D_ _x000D_ Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the reality thrilling.

Patience is the most necessary quality for business, many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request._x000D_ _x000D_ It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.

It is an ancient story_x000D_ _x000D_ Yet is it ever new.

Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

While every refugee's story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage - the courage not only to survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong.

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

A terrace nine stories high begins with a pile of earth.

Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it - it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy... When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.

I'm the hero of this story, I don't need to be saved

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

Vera said: 'Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?' So I told her why: Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.