Quotes About Storytelling

This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.

Cuando uno está borracho, va por ahí contando su historia. El talento de un hombre equivale a la historia que vende de mesa en mesa cuando está borracho.

Something occurs, in the motion of the present, but it's already over. Because even then, even as she watched, she was already moving away from it, already thinking about how years from now she might tell someone about this.

used to write her books.

The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

They know a million tricks, those novelists.

Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.

Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

many good liars have no imagination at all its which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction

Thou shalt not might' reach the head but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them.

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

I'm working on another Lyra book right now – it's called The Book of Dust. "It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'.

Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.

It's important to put it like that: not "I am a writer," but rather "I write stories." If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

Ovo je Fritz: beskoristan je, kao što vidiš. Posve neodgovoran. No, s druge strane, Fritz se samo igrao pripovjeda?a. Da je pravi majstor poput urara, znao bi kako svaki ?in ima svoju posljedicu. Iza svakog tik slijedi tak. Iza re?enice - Bio jednom... - mora slijediti pri?a, ina?e ?e slijediti nešto drugo, a to može biti puno opasnije od pri?e.

here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story.

When you write a story you're not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you're doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them and recounting them as clearly as you can.

I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that - not I am a writer, but rather I write stories. If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.

Except my uncle Ã¢â'¬Â¦ There's something I forgot to tell you. When he was showing them lantern slides, there was another one he had. It was the Roarer—' 'The what?' said John Faa. 'The Aurora,' said Farder Coram.

I can't do that anymore. That was just fancy. I was spinning tales out of the air, nothing more than that; there was nothing solid in them. Maybe Pan was right, and I haven't got a real imagination. I was bullshitting.

Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction. So

Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.