Plot comes from the mind but the characters come from the heart!

You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the...

Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go...

Ich bin eben kein Erzähler wie du.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

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

..so Grandpa turned the rusty latchkey of his magnificent remembery and set free a symphony of stories

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. … It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.

People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.

Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you...

The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when...

You can fix anything but a blank page.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

words, you see,” he said, looking at me again, “allow us to make permanent what is essentially transient.Turn a world filled with injustice and hurt into a place that is beautiful and lyrical.

I’ll tell you a secret.Old storytellers never die.They disappear into their own story.

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate...

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app,...

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today...

He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.

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...

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes...

Online personal branding is not about self-promotion… it’s about transferring your real world reputation into the online world.

Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.

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.

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion…Life on its own, without art to shape it,...

For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.

Fictions are realities we don’t think of, that are happening to people we know nothing about.

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

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in...

You want to hear more now, do you?

It can be very seductive to tell our story to others who will listen because, lets face it, who doesn’t love to ‘commiserate’ (in this context, meaning to share their misery) with other likeminded people....

Voglio dire che io fiuto le belle storie a chilometri di distanza. Quindi non tenti di nascondermene una. Sputi fuori, forza, e in cambio si guadagna una fetta di questo fantastico dolce con i buchi...

The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.

Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it…

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

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.

There is no greater power on this earth than story.

Truly, there is magic in fairytales.For it takes but a simply-uttered ‘Once upon a time…’ to allure and spellbind an audience.

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.

Miss Appleby, her library books, and her story-telling sessions were very popular with all the children in Heavenly Valley. To Nancy and Plum they were a magic carpet that whisked them out of the dreariness...

The heart is a repository of emotions–real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future–and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that...

People cannot relate to a perfectionist, there is beauty in brokenness. Your story will bring healing to others.

It’s fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who’s hearing Cinderella for the first time.