A Quote by John Steinbeck

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.

John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck
American - Author
February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

John Steinbeck

The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined the differing versions came to be.

Leslie Marmon Silko

Nothing requires so little mental effort as to narrate or follow a story. Hence everybody tells stories and the readers of stories outnumber all others.

John Lancaster Spalding

Many people think they cannot have knowledge or understanding of God without reading books. But hearing is better than reading, and seeing is better than hearing. Hearing about Benares is different from reading about it; but seeing Benares is different from either hearing or reading.

Ramakrishna

There are so many versions of every story because every storyteller tells the story differently.

Tomm Moore

You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.

Dale Archer

We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that's true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.

Jeanette Winterson

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

Paul Auster

There are so many stories from the Midwest that should be told. L.A. tells one story, and it's often about itself.

Sam Jaeger

Patti Callahan Henry’s THE STORIES WE TELL is a lyrical exploration of love and longing, secrets and suspicion, family and friendship, all told with the author’s trademark insights into the hollows and curves of the heart and mind of a working woman who must balance the demands of motherhood, wifedom, sisterhood, and yes, the deepest cravings for artistic expression. I always love the stories PCH tells!

Mary Kay Andrews

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.

Arthur Christiansen

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

Paul Auster

A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.

Billy Crudup

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories...The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.

Elena Ferrante

I had the privilege of hearing incredibly brave women standing up to tell their stories - harrowing stories that reduced many of us listeners to tears. But with each story, the taboo around domestic abuse weakens and the silence that surrounds it is broken, so other sufferers can know that there is hope for them and they are not alone.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall

I think it's a great thing to hear the author reading. I've listened to CDs of Cheever and Updike reading their stories and Hemingway. To hear what their voices were like is amazing. Whether they're reading well or not, it's great to listen to the intonation and the beat of the guy who wrote the story.

T.C. Boyle

A Quote by John Steinbeck

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