“oYu begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.”

“You begin with other people's stories and end up with your own.”

“I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send...”

“Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary ...”

“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story w...”

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes y...”

“I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when Im working on a story, Ill find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where theyve taken the story. Its as if ...”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”