Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters.

Live your life in such a way that it is going to be the favorite story of your generation and generations to come.

This story in my head is too hot to touch. I grabbed it anyway.

Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her...

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...

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it’s built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer...

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

U nekom trenutku sve priče postaju iste, kaže pripovedač, i sve vode do istog cilja. Veština je u tome, kaže pripovedač, da se onaj koj sluša ili čita priču navede na pomisao da je priča...

A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do....

No one cares about the art of the lie at this point. They insist on impressing with the truth. See me! Look at me! Look at who I am! Look at who I want you...

Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages.

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to...

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation....

When telling the story of your life, it is of great value to recognize and focus on the details that reveal or inspire an empowered unfolding of your being. Much like rewriting your own DNA,...

Stories are our gifts to a world that doesn’t see us.

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter...

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer...

The Leadership Seduction of storytelling invites self-pity, exaggerates one’s importance, and encourages inaction.

Relying only on logic, on what can be factually established, may inform or intimidate, but it will rarely stir anyone into action or change.

[I]t is the wine that leads me on,the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs,laugh like a fool – it drives theman to dancing… it eventempts him to blurt...

If we are going to live with our deepest differences then we must learn about one another.

It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.

The ability to see our lives as stories and share those stories with others is at the core of what it means to be human. We use stories to order and make sense of our...

I do believe that some humans have more amazing lives than others–above all, those who don’t sit down in a chair like mere spectators letting their lives happen in front of them, but they take...

To hell with facts! We need stories!

Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in allplaces, in all times.

As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business. I am a storyteller. Daydreaming is the best part of my job.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the...

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I’m hoping...

and their days make no story for they were good and joyful and without event

To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also to receive the myth (the fact that what has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accorded to all myths....

Storytellers don’t show, they tell. I’m sticking with that.

Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in...

The way some people read the parables reminds me of Aesop’s Fables. And the way others read them reminds me of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatle albums as evidence...

official” bard were spent? Perhaps he would decide to retire in a lighthouse. For, surely, no place would be more fitting for the hero emeritus. He would gaze upon the glorious sea in recollection…guiding others...

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is...

The operation would be in a week…I didn’t know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was...

It is an axiom of modern social psychology that the stories that tend to get repeated are the ones that somehow have the potential to strengthen the communities in which they are told, or to...

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed...

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

‘So what happens next?’ ‘Everybody dies, and the people who don’t get married.’ ‘Like any other story, then.’

Ture stories can’t be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

I think that’s the way people absorb television. All the explanations in Doctor Who are there if that’s your bag, but they’re not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn’t...

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.