I think it’s a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models...

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

(…) a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.

People tell stories and it’s up to those who listen whether to believe or not.””Shouldn’t the storyteller believe it.””The storyteller should tell it.

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.

I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can’t tell stories about certain characters because someone...

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger’s life, and then they’re content.

Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit...

Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the...

I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to...

Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to.

Magicians and Mentalist predict the future because they create it.

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.

Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain...

A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.

If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no...

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is...

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a...

Writing’s funny, it’s like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered...

In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success

we compose our life in stories we tell ourselves

The pleasures of being a novelist are many. But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally...

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited...

Stories are a communal currency of humanity.

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

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

What you should actually be trying to figure out is how to tell your story. The one that is every bit as unique to you as your fingerprints.This is the truly amazing feat because you...

Stories,’ the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, ‘are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face...

I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken...

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because...

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not...

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story...

pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she’d done penance for stories – stories that I’ll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She’d...

You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was...

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...

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told...

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.

If you want meaning for your brand or company, dare to embrace conflict

I have witnessed how the power of listening, storytelling and embracing gray areas breaks through the rigid ‘us vs. them.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.