A Quote by Tom Bodett

Tom Kizzia hasn't just observed and written about Alaska for three-plus decades, he's lived it. 'Pilgrim's Wilderness' is a story that needed to be told by the only man who could tell it.
A lot of banging in the head has built up over the decades, and for my own sanity, I needed to write. I wanted to see if I could tell an honest, organic story about characters that interest me.
When I read 'The Water Diviner,' I was having the same kind of visceral reaction that I would normally have acting in something. I believed that I was the only person that could tell this story the way it needed to be told. That's the real arrogance of a director!
The set of '12 Years a Slave' was an extremely joyous one! We all recognized that we were making a powerful, necessary and beautiful film, and we weren't about doing it without that sense of responsibility, and we recognized that we needed each other to tell this story. We also knew we needed to hold each other up as we told the story.
A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not.
When I write a story, I just wanna tell you what's in my head. It can come from real life and then turn into fantasy, stuff just rhyming. And write about what you know. I just like to tell stories that have not been told or [told] from my perspective.
I think you tell the story that has to be told. You tell the story that's the truth. You tell the story that readers will be interested in and should know about.
It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.
I have lived in the only decades I could have lived in, and hope to live through at least a few more.
What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.
I do have screenplays I've written that never saw the light of day, but I don't usually go back to them. When I've told a story, I want to tell another story.
Too many writers think that all you need to do is write well-but that's only part of what a good book is. Above all, a good book tells a good story. Focus on the story first. Ask yourself, 'Will other people find this story so interesting that they will tell others about it?' Remember: A bestselling book usually follows a simple rule, 'It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told'; not, 'It's a wonderfully told story.'
The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.
If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
There should be a whole book written about that one word: country. What does that mean, country? It's such a huge umbrella. I would hope that what makes it country is that it all starts with a song. The story being told in three and a half minutes that is not being told on another station.
No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire.
I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.
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