Quotes About Anecdote

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. [ A Conversation with Alice Munro , BookBrowse, 1998]

Daddy always said Grandpa was so tight that when he blinked the skin on his pecker rolled back.

Mr. Beebe smiled as Miss Alan plunged into an anecdote which he knew she would be unable to finish in the presence of a gentleman.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once attended a meeting in which he was the shortest man present. "Dr. Holmes," quipped a friend, "I should think you'd feel rather small among us big fellows." "I do," retorted Holmes, "I feel like a dime among a lot of pennies."

I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died.

For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.

I got live tweeted once by someone who was opposite my home in some rented accommodation. He was actually describing on twitter what I was doing. 'I took a shirt off, I went to the window, I put a shirt back on... ' And I've got blinds in my flat!

For me, the first thing is to tell a good story.

ANECDOTE  (A'NECDOTE)   n.s.[   yet unpublished; secret history. Some modern ancedotes aver,He nodded in his elbow-chair.Prior.

Like most adventures, it was best experienced in the telling, rather than the execution.

My old friend Jack Benny has only had one ball all his golfing life. And now he's lost it. The string came off!

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

History: gossip well told.

If there is a good story, I will take it up.

One time Robert Plant was set to check into the same room after I checked out, so I removed every light bulb and ordered up a bunch of stinky cheese and put it under the mattress.

One time I tried to marry a chicken.

Gramps said, 'How about a story? Spin us a yarn.

There was never any point in my life when I wasn't called Mr. Donen. I'm told my first words were, 'Call me Mr. Donen.' But I suspect that's apocryphal. My mother, Mrs. Donen, tended to exaggerate.

occhiolism n. the awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn't possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.

Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.

The last time I played golf with President Ford he hit a birdie. And an eagle, a moose, an elk, an aardvark...

People don't remember you for all of the good things you do. They remember the time you blew a giant green snot bubble out your nose.

The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!

He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others