Quotes About Story

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

Was he joking? Would he really have shot Kinski? 'I said it very quietly so he understood that it was not a joke. But the story then took on a life of its own, until today you can read that I directed him only at gunpoint from behind the camera! That's baloney. It never happened like that. When I talked to him, I did not have a gun in my hands. However, I did have a gun …

In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

Living "biblically," I would suggest, means recognizing our place in God's story and living in such a way that we reflect his nature and purpose in the world.

How the church communicates its message, how it tells and lives "the old, old story," and why and how that story matters today is all part of the work the church needs to do. How churches organize themselves and whether they snap, crackle and pop in the way some think they should is not primarily about money, size or technology. The issues are more basic: will the church embody and articulate its only legitimate identity? Will God's people live as followers of Jesus?

The Indian farmer suicide story is a myth built on tragic individual anecdotes and extrapolated to a whole country by those like Vandana Shiva with an ideological axe to grind and little concern about the true facts.

Evoking the full power of your players' imagination must be your primary goal when in this environment. We could tell you what everything looks like, but that would leave you no room to work whenever the players entered the Umbra (looking things up always slows the story down). Besides, no one truly knows what the Umbra is, for it is different from every perspective-there is no right or wrong.

As a writer, have faith in your unconscious mind. Unbeknownst to you, it will guide your story, make connections, and weave the tale for you

Every novel begins with one sentence. Then comes another. And another.

The art of the deletion: streamlining your prose, keeping it focused and true to the story's narrative pace without denuding it.

Without conflict, there is no story. Without a story, there is no novel--only the author's self-indulgent musings.

I look at revision as a sort of creative destruction--you break a script down and rebuild parts of it more imaginatively, yet remaining true to the story.

There's a novel in every life's story. You must have courage, perseverance and use imagination to unearth it.

There's no such thing as a dull life. Every life is a saga.

You know you've been writing from the heart when, in the midst of a story, you ask, 'What would my mother think of this?

Rather than a story of sin, Genesis 2–3 explicitly relates a transferal of the knowledge of good and evil from the deity to the humans.

It's a mean story, Helen fumed. An absentee father who demands that his children put him at the center of their lives and beg for his return. Sister Priscilla didn't think it was mean, apparently. She was so in love with God that she had married him, even though she would not see his face, hear his voice, or feel his embrace for as long as she lived. One of us, Helen, thought is flying blind.

My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.

My first reaction was that the story of Pino Lella's life in the last twenty-three months of the war could not possibly be true. We would have heard it before. But then I learned that Pino—pronounced pea-no—was still alive some six decades later and back in Italy after nearly thirty years in Beverly Hills and Mammoth Lakes, California.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

This book has too much plot and not enough story.

Humor is important. If you're going to tell any sort of realistic story, you're going to have to have humor in it, because people are funny. Clever people especially.

?Why,? he began slowly, ?is Victor Dashkov joining us?? ?Well, it?s kind of a funny story . . .?