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.

Speak up and speak clearly. I want to hear what you have to say because it matters. Let’s listen to each other and respect one another’s opinions. Although, they may be different, wisdom allows us...

Taking his time, as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he...

How could an alphabet—letters that didn’t even mean anything by themselves—be important?But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle’s newspaper.It was all about words.If words weren’t important, they wouldn’t try so...

Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

We come together as a community — in our sitting room, in sacred space or in a coffee shop. We share our joy and pain, our surprises and disappointments, successes and failures and we try...

Do you have to do murder?Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects–a woman’s chastity, and murder. Nobody’s interested in chastity any more. Murder’s all we...

Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths… The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains...

I heard so many stories from Gaomi’s peasants that I had an irrepressible urge to write them down. Today, Gaomi’s peasants know that they have become famous around the world through my writings, but I...

Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?

pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up...

I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.

I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of...

Moral stories are always imaginary , but these stories induce real moral values in a human society .

Or was Chris thinking, as I was, that if we went tothe police and told our story, our faces would be splashed on the frontpages of every newspaper in the country? Would the glare of...

Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.

Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn’t it?

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can...

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...

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That’s what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other’s stories. (p.237)

The common thread from all those stories was that talking helped, and listening, and time. One day I would find my own place. I couldn’t run there, though, because it didn’t exist yet; I had...

I guess artists are living inspiration. There’s something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It’s not unified.

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn’t get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely,...

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale...

CNN is getting smarter, and you can feel it in the stories, you can feel it in the depth with which they’re covered, the kinds of people in terms of guests who are brought on...

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the...

Ah—now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king...

Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.

I’m never really upset when a person lies because I don’t place much value in truths. When you look at the grand design, you realize that there are no truths, only stories. In other words,...

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story...

But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.

Il y a bien longtemps, Tigre possédait les histoires. […] Dans les histoires de Tigre, tout ce qui compte c’est la puissance des crocs, la manière dont on chasse et celle dont on tue. Il...

Light a campfire and everyone’s a storyteller

As a writer, I see the saga of your life in a single glimpse. It may be inaccurate, but my version doesn’t lack for creativity.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

Fairy tales are rife with transformation — from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself...