Top 1200 Scary Stories Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

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.

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.

Even though I was super personal with 'American Teen,' I want to tap in and not just tell my own stories but tell the stories of other people - so that I can help as many people as possible.

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

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 like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it's a better way of telling the stories.

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.

There was Uncle Ken of mine about whom I wrote a lot of stories. I can always write stories about uncles and aunts and distant relatives. They have to be distant, though; otherwise, you'll be in trouble.

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.

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

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.

My very first lessons in the art of telling stories took place in the kitchen . . . my mother and three or four of her friends. . . told stories. . .with effortless art and technique. They were natural-born storytellers in the oral tradition.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

Excuse me, scary people. (Alix)

I look for us - people of color in Hollywood, to create more stories as writers, directors and filmmakers, creating more opportunities for ethnic actors. At the end of the day, we have to be the ones giving jobs and telling the stories, not just waiting to be hired.

The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.

Religion is a huge part of our consciousness. I grew up in the Bible Belt, so it's our mythology. Those are the stories we learn as little kids at Sunday school. I'm not afraid to use the metaphors, because I think the stories are beautiful.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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'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.'

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 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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Nothing connects with people like humanity. That doesn't mean you have to tell slice-of-life stories all the time. But you know, with so many options in technology, the consumer's not really that interested in advertising... They are interested in great stories. That transcends any medium.

I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

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.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

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.

Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

The stories that are most unfamiliar, the ones that seem to come out of the blue about people that aren't well known, usually come from producers that have really done a lot of homework and looked around. Other stories come from the correspondents.

I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing 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.

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.

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.