Quotes About Stories

If you've ever been in a bar with a bunch of old sailors and see a guy that has an eagle tattooed across his chest, that guy has seen some stuff.

I could direct a very decent Holocaust film, but I don't have the same experience as a young boy who was rocked to sleep in the lap of a grandmother who had a tattooed number on her arm, who told him stories of the people who disappeared, the relatives she never saw again, as he drifted off with his cheek nestled next to that number.

I have over 35 tattoos.

Some of my tattoos are a bit silly, but I know where and what time I got them.

Most of my tattoos have a story. When people ask me, I tell them whatever they want hear. 'What's this tattoo? What does this mean? Does it hurt?' I tell them everything they want to know.

I have multiple tattoos.

Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.

James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols.

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.

I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.

Teachers have a million stories, but nobody consults them.

I've been writing stories since I was 12. 'Writer's Digest' was one of my writing teachers, actually.

'The Chicken Soup for the Soul' books are the result of over 20 years of teaching seminars and giving speeches. The first book contains all of the stories that I used in my seminars to illustrate the points that I wanted to make.

I think, reading the Grimm's fairy tales, they all have some sort of moral component to them, teaching you a lesson.

Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories.

But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

I was kind of reflecting on my life and certain experiences, and you know, when I'm teaching and coaching my partners on 'Dancing With the Stars,' I sort of use those stories and anecdotes to help them sort of overcome certain fears.

The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.

I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon