Story Quotes - Page 2

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark - the perfect time for creativity.

No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.

A quote is a story, suspended in a sentence and treasured through time.

If there were a master of stupidity in this world,
I would really love to listen to his success story.

To write is to reveal oneself.
When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.
I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

We do not have to see the beginning and the end of our lives, but we must close our eyes and live as if we didn't start or would never end.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else - grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

A story just isn't a story without a dragon.

The world of light and starry grace;
within your mind I live to trace.
Your thought’s speed in thunder’s glory,
lightening my being with dream’s story.
I embrace the tree carrying your name
Your unspoken wish : the heart of fame.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.