By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across–each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip–is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom,...

The voices in my head wouldn’t shut up, so I let them write their story.

All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you’re selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.

We live vicariously through stories, because our own lives provide so few opportunities for high-stakes adventure and noble sacrifice.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

As children we reveled in the dream that there was a place out there that was different from the one we lived in.

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out...

Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it.

But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.

Women.Lord God, I used to follow these girls. THey would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and...

I picked up a snake once. In Italy.””Why did you do that?””For a bet.””Was it poisonous?””We didn’t know. That was the point of the bet.””Did it bite you?””Of course.””Why of course?””It wouldn’t be much of...

You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,’ he says, ‘the same way this theater seems to digest people.’ With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky...

Luz’s manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn’t that she made things up, strictly speaking–only that facts were merely a point of departure for...

What are stories for if we don’t learn from them?

You’ve just got to focus on excellence and try not to be distracted by the news and the rumors and the absurdities of the stories that were coming out.

I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven’t the strength, stupidly. I...

…not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller’s tale may end, but history goes on always.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

Some stories end in despair, some begin there

But you’re an artist. you should know there’s more to a story than the part happening right now.

I eat stories like grapes.

David had left her,taking his insane jealousy with him.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can....

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn’t really mind–or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a...

If ever you feel lost, terrified, alone, emotionally and physically drained…when you feel like depression has overpowered you, and that the world itself, has devoured you…just remember that you are not alone, you are loved,...

Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

They help me understand myself better.

We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today’s writing falls into the first category.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again....

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it.

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for....

I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it’s no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how...

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and...

I love it when there’s nothingLeft to see but tiny spots of what’s still lightStories piercing the night.

Wit smiled. “All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

her daughter”.

It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.

There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow...

This is a classic story of the friendship between humans and cats. Yes. I got in a lie right from the start!

What I’m always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces – the ghost stories that engaged us.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the...

Stories are a different kind of true.

What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he’s making up his stories, but he—or better yet, *she*—watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves...

U nekom trenutku sve priče postaju iste, kaže pripovedač, i sve vode do istog cilja. Veština je u tome, kaže pripovedač, da se onaj koj sluša ili čita priču navede na pomisao da je priča...

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.

It made a romantic tale. The young rouge, cheating death, returning to his grieving lover. But in reality? Ashyn had always known life did not resemble one of her book stories or Moria’s bard tales,...

…what your life means depends on how you tell the story.