Top 1200 Inventing Stories Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed.

I don't have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don't find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren't interested in those stories.

We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.

The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."

As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house... Those stories led me to my writing.

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.

I wanted to write a story that was different than what I've done before - so I decided to write dual love stories that will keep the reader wondering how the stories will come together by the end.

Its important to know stories. I felt the earth shift to make a place for you when you were born, and I came to tell you stories while you are young. And like me, you were born with a word on your tongue.

I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.

I don't abandon stories once I've started working on them. Once I sit down and start a story, I'll be damned if I'm going to give up on it. But I do reject most of the ideas for stories that I come up with.

I want to be able to bring out stories like 'Verna,' as well as stories which are of the modern and new generation like 'Ho Mann Jahaan,' which is a film I did of the youth of Pakistan.

Our mandate expects that we will build on the Joint Inquiry's investigation and we will not be re-inventing the wheel. But we go to places which the Joint Inquiry was not permitted to explore.

I don't design stories to fit some political ideology. I design stories about characters who I love and care about, while trying to make sense of an increasingly mad and toxic and insane world.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

I get very emotional about time periods I never lived in, but I have a weird connection to them. The mystery of it becomes about hearing the stories of those eras, and creating nostalgia from those stories.

When I decided to make my version of Poe's stories, I wanted to respect the original material or to at least get closer to what his stories are really about. Most other adaptations I've seen sort of follow the story but they never satisfy me as an audience member or as a reader.

I happen to write a lot of stories that make Kissinger look bad. I'd rather that the stories weren't true, but they all happen to be true.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.

Very early on, I was writing stories, and I was amazed at Spielberg's movies when I was young. Coming from the countryside, I was so impressed with the way he was able to tell stories and the way he was able to deal with le merveilleux - the wonders.

I asked my mum, who's a very clever psychotherapist, and she says that kids love stories about death; they need it, they need to have stories that deal with death and explain it, as a place to put their fears.

I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild.

I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony.

Dad thought something very fishy was going on when, at 22, I was offered a job for £1,000 a year - more than Dad paid his own staff - for inventing cheese recipes and writing leaflets at the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London.

Digression is my passion. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten, and that are kind of surprising. The problem is, how do you pare stories away so that the book doesn't become a distracting jumble of material, and readers lose focus? In my experience, there's really only one way to do that. I pack it all in with the rough draft, then count on myself and my trusted readers to tell me what's good and what's not good.

How many stories have you read that aren't true, stories about me and Angie being married or fighting or splitting up? And when we don't split up, there's a whole new round that we've made up and we're back together again!

Kevin Hart. He's the man! I like his style. He's short, so I can relate. All the stories he tells are real. I respect that, and he's just a really funny dude - great comedy instincts. To do stand-up on a stage for an hour and tell stories and make people laugh is incredible.

I am always looking for stories that will shed light on how companies define themselves - for better or for worse. When shared with others, such stories can have an enormous impact on how well we move forward in the changing world around us.

I dish the dirt out, and I can take it. But why should my mother and children have to take it? In 20 years, I have taken any number of stories, most of which are not true, without a murmur of complaint. But some stories you have to draw the line and say No.

I find that you're drawn to certain stories, and there's something about fairytales that have deep roots. They connect really deeply to you, and those are the stories that I find myself drawn to. I love characters that believe the impossible is possible.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.

I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.

Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word.

There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

I came to graduate school with a certain vocabulary about how to talk about other people's stories, but I couldn't understand how to look at my own stories in that way. And that was what made editing such a challenge for me.

And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

When I was going into inventing, it wasn't a dream the way someone goes into nursing or dancing. Because there's a path with that. It's very different when you say, 'I have an idea and it doesn't exist.' It's a very different path.

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.

I was shy, but I stood up in front of the class and I gave my report.I was reporting on books that I didn't want to read. I was inventing books that I didn't want to read.

The Voice did not consider itself a conventional magazine. It took me awhile to realize that it was named The Voice for a reason. They wanted voices. At the time, good magazine stories were still believed to be written in the third person based on the false belief they were more objective. Of course some conventional stories require third person, but in the really interesting stories - the ones I got do to at The Voice and Esquire - were about subjectivity, subjectivities.

I'm not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, 'All right! Get out of the room.'

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.

I actually pushed the boundaries on how long a book like this [The Thorn and the Blossom] can be. The original plan called for two 7,500 word stories, and I turned in two 10,000 word stories.

For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.

I'm really into the idea of telling stories. Everyone needs stories. Everyone needs to escape every once in a while.

I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

"Stories don't always have happy endings." This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

Inventing is something that has always come very natural to me. As a child, I was always fiddling with things, making contraptions. I'd see something, go home, and try to make something even better.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks.

Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable.

When I was in Boy Scouts, back in the day, we'd tell stories around the campfire. That's why I love movies. It's literally you and your friends, telling stories around a campfire, whatever they may be.

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

I began to encounter real-life stories of dogs protecting their wounded or dying or dead handler... or dogs refusing to leave the bodies of the people they were bonded to, sitting in cemeteries for days or sometimes weeks. You find these stories endlessly.

No, nothing much has changed in me as an actor. Since the day I started out, I always wanted to be part of good stories. The only thing that has changed is now I have options of good stories to choose from.