Stories Quotes

That’s how stories happen - with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

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 with the novel you've written.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

People who understand everything get no stories.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.