Quotes on Story

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard when I was growing up were simply made up - and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out.

What you look for as a reader is somebody who is going to take you and say, 'C'mon. Come into the story. I'm going to show you what there is to see.' The guide who is going to tell you, 'Pay attention over there,' or, 'Do you remember that other thing? Now watch!'

It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.

'Blacks were too scared to do anything, but they came out to greet James Meredith': That would have been the story in the evening news if I hadn't gotten myself shot. I got shot, and that allowed the movement protest thing to take over then and do their thing.

I think when people have the freedom to tell their own story rather than trying to be specific to a certain design or style, there's more freedom, and it ends up feeling more like home. Those spaces we see in magazines and on the Internet are beautiful, but if there's not that story there, then it's going to lack that feeling of home.

My inclination, as an old-school, classically trained journalist, is not to go with a story unless I have it hard. It's not good enough to say something based on rumors that were flying around.

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too - and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act on it.

If you have a secret, and it's embarrassing to you, when you tell that story - you own it. It becomes yours, and no one can use it against you.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

I would like, if I can, to broaden the possibilities of the musical theater. I think there's a better 'Oklahoma!' someplace, a better 'West Side Story.' And I'd like to be mixed up in it.

When I meet gay kids and they know who we are, I remember that's amazing because literally every gay person in every gay story I knew growing up was doomed to die. There weren't any positive gay stories and it's incredible that has changed.

A novel should tell a story, be a pleasure to read, and at the same time it should be thought-provoking, even a bit instructive.

You know someone is your favorite person when you've done a day of press, listened to yourself ad nauseam, listened to them tell every story, and when it ends, it's like, 'Are we going to eat something?'

A true war story is never moral.

Let me tell you a story about when I was growing up in Spain. Many Sundays, we would invite 30, 40, 50 people to the countryside, and my father would make a big paella. He put me in charge of the fire and the 'stove' - the rocks that hold the pan. But he wouldn't let me cook. I got so unbelievably upset.

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.