127 quotes found
“Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and frie...”
“Stories are important too. Stories help make sense of things. They make you believe you can do things. They help you imagine that things may be different, that if you just have enough courage... or...”
“Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication”
“Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.”
“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and au...”
“To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.”
“My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the...”
“All fiction boils down to two plots: Either a stranger comes to town or someone goes on a trip.”
“It's easier to make up storiesthan it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The storywakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the...”
“People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.”
“Heres the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishesespecially the most verboten and destructive onesthe more you spell the story out, the less aesthetica...”
“Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purp...”
“Telling a story is like sowing a seedyou always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know wh...”
“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.”
“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. The truth of something you do is very di...”
“Without desire how is it possible to make a story?”
“No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.”
“That's the problem with revealing true truths. They make people uncomfortable. The truth should be grand and exotic, but mostly it isn't. Mostly it's uncomfortable.”
“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 to think I am!”
“These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the tell...”
