I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Tell me half a cup’s worth of story and we’ll call it a night.

In the end, it wasn’t so much that there was an alternative narrative–there always was–but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more...

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...

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

Many more have died of attempting love than victory, and countless numbers hate love more than war. Honor has often been the dear prize awarded to the killers of lovers. The epics of war have...

Of course, the writer can impose control; It’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however… that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is...

Even though this princess loved the oak and the castle and her mother, the queen, she tired of the beautiful swamp, of her surroundings. You see, as she grew she came to realize that if...

Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social...

People who are left alone tell the story but are never a part of it; those who are a part of the crowd, are story bound, acting upon the role assigned to them in the...

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) ‘There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever...

Stories. Character. Dialouge. Entire worlds created on the page. Worlds that could sweep you away or frighten you, make you laugh or cry. Worlds that allowed you to escape to another country or time. Worlds...

All of our lives are a living, breathing story, and each heartbeat means a new page has been turned; chapters don’t close, they continue.

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That’s the story I want to tell all the time. It’s the story I wanted to live – somebody who appears to be, or is, weak...

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to...

Stories give color to black and white information.

By telling stories, Jesus isn’t somehow putting sugar in a spoon to make the medicine go down a bit easier. These stories are the medicine. These stories are an extension and explanation of Jesus’ revolutionary...

All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth — yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes...

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting...

Your eyes, ears and mind are imperfect in front of magic.

As soon as we open our eyes in the morning, what we want most is to matter, to live a life and to do a work that has meaning. We have evolved to feel this...

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary...

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

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It’s just too bad.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part,...

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

…What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

Good storytellers are always ready for the next question.

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

Don’t be scared of scars. They just tell stories that are hard to hear.

My characters don’t always know more than the reader does, because my readers get the best seat in Paper House.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know...

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if...

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls…

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The...

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

A story is never complete.

What if things happened to you—special, magic things—because you’d been preparing for them?

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

…required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you’re really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.