Top 1200 Writing Stories Quotes & Sayings - Page 19

I also write stories and want to show these stories to the world; someday someone might want to direct them.

In history class, I wrote a poem, 'The Royalists and the Roundheads.' I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it.

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.

Writing is writing. It's an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.

In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work. I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.

The Bible give us a list of human stories on both sides of the ledger. On list of human stories is used examples - do what these people did. Another list of human stories is used as warnings - don't do what these people did. So if your story ever gets in one of these books, make sure they use it as an example, not a warning.

What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.

Everything we know has come from stories that have been told over and over again as truth. Those stories turn into history.

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.

There are only really a few stories to tell in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of those good stories to tell.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

I like all kinds of stories, and I usually work on several stories at once. When I run out of gas on one, I start work on the other.

I always look for stories that really try to tell the world that I see, a world that values and is full, in fact, of stories that are important.

There are stories I'd like to tell, I'd like to see, and they're not getting made. These stories are beyond the experience of the people in power. They don't understand it, so they're frightened of it.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.

She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

The daily writing practice is something I used to hear batted around a lot in writing workshops - which is probably why I dropped out of all the writing workshops. I wish I could take credit for innovating a new approach to writing, but the truth is that I've managed to write books despite myself. I'm lazy and ungovernable and undisciplined, but I do have a lot of anxiety about never amounting to anything and ending up as a bag lady.

Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories.

Stories are best when they 'emerge' from the depths, and when built in a painting from early sketch through the three-act process to The End, it is a perfect pathway to the unconscious stories set in our dreamwork.

I would love to do Tammi Terrell's story. I love stories of the underdog coming out on top and stories of survival.

Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."

I was reading stories by Raymond Carver and some of his stuff sort of ended abruptly here and there, where in other short stories that I've read have a bit of an ending, a climax, a twist or something like that.

The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible - stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.

Back in the day, Barry Crump not only had these stories that talked about that kind of rustic personality, but also, he spoke volumes, I guess, of the relationships in the stories that he told in these books.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

I want to tell good stories, real stories with a message and I want to play meaty characters that drive the story.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

You know, I began my life as a creative person writing true things for magazines and telling some very honest, straightforward personal essaying for This American Life, but until someone forces you, with a deadline, to really observe your life - unless you're motivated to do it yourself - there's so many stories that you miss.

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.

At first I was thinking of it as superheroes who happened to be teenagers. Then I realized, no, I'm writing about teenagers who happen to be superheroes. Thinking like that changed everything for me. I started approaching the stories through the characters' core emotions, rather than leading with the superpowers.

I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.

Data are just summaries of thousands of stories - tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.

The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

I really think the Bible is a baseline where all stories come from. All of the zillion stories in the Bible provide inspiration for everything.

The beauty of Netflix is, their job is to put stories out there, and not stories that appeal to everybody, which is maybe NBC's job?

One of the things that attracts me to vintage and antique things is they have stories, and even if I don't know the stories, I make them up.

I'm always reading. And I keep a whole list of stories, often unusual stories. There are a hundred some-odd ideas on that list.

My key interest in choosing scripts is character-driven stories, because there are so many stories that sacrifice character for plot.

When I was younger it was a lot of quantity over quality. Just writing, writing, writing. Hundreds of songs. Now it's fewer songs. If I write 10 songs I believe 80 percent of them are good and gonna be used.

Story matters. Writing is important. Stories make the world go around. Many things begin as words on a page. It matters to the world. And it matters to you. Don't let anyone rob you of that. Don't rob yourself of it, either. Don't diminish. Don't dismiss. Embrace. Create. Accelerate.

You learn a lot more from stories about getting rejected than stories about becoming happy.

Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.

History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.

News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.

Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.

At the beginning of my career, a more senior photographer told me to shoot stories on women and I didn't want to. But I spent two and a half years in India and chose to do stories about women because I was shocked by their treatment. My stories in the Middle East and on the border of Europe and Asia were a response to my time in India. They weren't driven by a feminist idea but when you're moved by women's issues in these countries you can't help becoming a feminist somehow.

The other day, someone told me that all my life I will be telling the stories of underdogs. Their stories always appeal to me.

Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart.

I am still attracted to stories about people who are considered to be on the outside of society. I still seek inspiration from those stories.

Most of the stories I have go downhill quickly. In all honesty most of the good stories I have, no one else would think is funny.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

My music is more than me writing a flashy soul song. They're heartfelt songs about my family and true stories. I have also songs that aren't personal, but just painting a picture. I don't like being put under labels, but my music is going to continue to stay classic and timeless forever.

In the case of 'The Book Thief,' my research was hearing the stories of my parents when I was a child. But I started changing the stories when I began moulding the book.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

When I went to Jamia, I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer or photographer because I liked telling stories in pictures, but my teachers explained that if you want to tell your own stories then that is what a director does.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

I didn't do anything as active as deciding that I wanted to be a writer. For one thing, I didn't feel like I was the final authority on whether or not I was anything like a writer. (I'm a timid soul.) I just kept writing stories, because becoming a veterinarian seemed as if it involved too much dissection.

This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.