The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

Sneaking was a kind of deceit. So was disguise. Just past midnight, wearing dark trousers and Fox’s hood, the queen snuck out of her own rooms and stepped into a world of stories and lies.

It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.

Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches...

There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to...

I’ve read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill...

That’s what heroic stories do for us. They show us the way. They remind us of the good we are capable of.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I remember myself at 10 years old telling stories to my sisters and brother. This is something I did through my adolescence and even through my twenties.

Stories are how we connect. Evolution isn’t seriously about thumbs but about how we use language – that’s what raises us above dumb animals, right? Language?

The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the Cabinet des Fées. Charles...

Sometimes I think I’m a one-trick pony because I’m not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

You can never know enough about your characters

Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are...

They weren’t true stories; they were better than that.

And yet, wasn’t the terrific thing about stories the fact that they joined readers together, that they made people realize they were not alone in their hopes, dreams, and fears?

My level of intervention in the press, trying to control stories, is zero. Subzero.

Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a...

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life...

History isn’t all fact–it’s just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it’s been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time. And so I tell my story to you, as...

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change,...

I’ve heard stories about authors filled with this kind of Lotto-winner hubris. I’m a Dutch boy from the Midwest. We don’t have hubris.

My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never...

I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can...

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

Everybody loves vampire stories, and if there’s one show in particular that’s done really well, it just opens the door and the opportunity for more of those kind of stories to get through.

I have a friend who likes to date younger women because their stories are shorter. Old men like us, our stories are longer.

I’ve been writing stories since I was 12. ‘Writer’s Digest’ was one of my writing teachers, actually.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

“” ― Neil Gaiman

I love stories – devising them, writing them, reading them, watching them, being a part of them.

What’s interesting about the U.K. is that it celebrates an alternative voice. It’s up for telling new stories.

Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths – overlapping,...

…someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I’m a collector of shavings.

Stories are one of the most powerful ways in which we communicate ideas among ourselves. They are the stuff that brings us together, the things we celebrate, the things we share with one another.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear,...

Everybody’s got stories. I don’t want to not have stories.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even...

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Supposing an emperor was persuaded to wear a new suit of clothes whose material was so fine that, to the common eye, the clothes weren’t there. And suppose a little boy pointed out this fact...

I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they’re not because I write in the first person.

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses...

All good stories – stories that touch your soul, stories that change your nature, stories that cause you to become a better person from their telling – these stories always contain truth.

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else’s, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren’t islands, so far as I...