Is this a kissing book?

Great stories build relationships and make people care. Those two things are necessary to change anything.

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

Whatever story you’re telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, “and then everything burst into flames.

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the...

I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where...

Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business… Lunch was fried chicken...

Storytelling–that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won’t survive.

Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

You bound him to you with your courage and your tales. You hold him to you now. You captured a wild creature when you had no place you could keep him.

[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. ‘My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck–‘[Opal] ‘Was?'[J] ‘Be quiet. I’m telling a story here.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines;...

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.

When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.

We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are...

How does it happen that a writer who’s not even very good – and I can say that, I’ve read four or five of his books – gets to be in charge of the world’s...

Too much truth destroys.

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

The telling and hearing of stories is a bonding ritual that breaks through illusions of separateness and activates a deep sense of our collective interdependence.

ANYTHING IN THIS UNIVERSE CAN BE A STORY WORTH TELLING, AS LONG AS YOU KNOW HOW TO BEST TELL IT.

I Write books for the little girl in the adult woman who some man told she was not good enough. Let us dismantle the notion that a woman cannot be free with her sexuality or...

As far as I’m concerned, story is everything. It is why we get up in the morning and how we choose who to take to bed at night. Story is the thread that weaves together...

That is the power of a good story. It can encourage you, it can make you laugh, it can bring you joy. It will make you think, it will tap innto your hidden emotions, and...

A tale spinner’s goal is entertainment.

When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part...

Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in...

Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.

Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words....

Stories are not like the real world; they aren’t held back by what we know is false or true. What’s important is how a story makes you feel inside.

We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we...

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen,...

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.

When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night’s sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I...

Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. This is different from what we call “history.” Mythical stories, when you trace them back to their origin, often have a sacredness, a holy quality...

The drinking dens are spilling outThere’s staggering in the squareThere’s lads and lasses falling aboutAnd a crackling in the airDown around the dungeon doorsThe shelters and the queuesEverybody’s looking forSomebody’s arms to fall intoAnd it’s...

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...

Stories have a job to do. They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.

A writer is a dangerous friend. Everything you say, all of your life and experience, is fodder for our writing. We mean you no harm, but what you know and what you’ve done is unavoidably...

Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher..

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The...

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or...

What I’m going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it’s an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a...

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.

The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.