There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story… don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words–the language. Don’t be...

In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story...

I love stories that suck you in, that you can’t stop reading because you are quite simply there.

To have a different life you have be a different person. You have to do what you haven’t done. You have to become the person that fits that dream. But most of all, you have...

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality,...

so little of what anything means comes through words.

The story became a cloud, and the cloud a sheet of rain, and rain fell throughout the empire.

Magicians and Mentalist predict the future because they create it.

The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

There’s more to stories than it seems at first looking,” she said. “Two sides to most stories. Folks better be thinking about that for once.

The biblical story is in dialogue with the other stories of its time. And if the Bible can be in dialogue with other cultures, why can’t the people who are descendants of the Bible be...

I like telling stories.

Trust the story … the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can’t: the story can only ever be itself.

Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

As far as I can figure, the way that it works is this: everyone has something that happened to them. The thing that we each carry. And you can see it in people, if you...

I’d used people’s stories and their lives to bolster my political arguments for changing welfare. Now, however, I was running into the people themselves, and I realized that using anyone’s tragedy for political gain was...

I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often...

A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens ’em. And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide.

What doesn’t kill us makes us funnier.

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to...

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It’s the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your...

People are wonderful. Each one has a story, each something to give, each knows something interesting, something that can make your life richer.

I can’t protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the...

Stories which have failed either to become popular folk lore or to be embalmed in old newspaper files are in great danger of oblivion. If they are saved, often it is by the merest chance....

Betty had forgotten how you only get slivers of stories from children – usually what they echo from overheard adult conversations.

Who makes you Storyteller? You do. You are. Go play.

Fossils have richer stories to tell – about the lub-dub of dinosaur life – than we have been willing to listen to.

Not all events are stories.

The possibilities were endless. Battles would be fought. Wonders revealed. Many journeys. Many lands. Many joys. Many sorrows.But stories all…

It sounds trite, but I like telling stories.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no...

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to...

We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive… Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can’t...

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

People ask me all the time, “Where do your ideas come from?” So, to clear up this question…I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

A good trap is like a good story: hidden and leading towardone inevitable conclusion

There’s always more to the story, Catriona,” She replied. “That’s the wonderful thing about stories.

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

It’s what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That’s why you’re so important, Charlie. You’re a guardian of our national memory.

Soll ich dir eine Geschichte erzählen? Nein.Warum nicht? Der Junge sah ihn an und wandte den Blick ab.Warum nicht? Diese Geschichten sind nicht wahr. Das müssen sie auch nicht sein. Es sind Geschichten. Ja. Aber...

Well written novels are penned by authors who have a unique and personal ardor for their story. They fabricate the phrases of their mind into a voice and thus a character is born.

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.

Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. Information or a take-home message.