Story Writers Quotes

So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief. ~ John Fante

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few. ~ Terry Brooks

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story. ~ Lynn Abbey

To survive, you must tell stories. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Andre Dubus

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. ~ John Steinbeck

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences. ~ Anne McCaffrey

...I've never understood the logic that says a work doesn't need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I've also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer. ~ Glen Hirshberg

For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing. ~ Carol Bly

I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley's wonderful phrase - I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin's Letters - that the "doors of the Russian house are wide open": we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Stephen King started to read comics first, I started to watch films and little reading books...Now everything has changed Stephen King reads books and watch films, I read comics, watch films, read books listen to audiobooks...
This are two different stories, you were challanged to open them, good job you open them now but can you try to start a new life??
To start by opening a new book??
Meeting with new characters??
With new writers??
With one new book which has a story which you haven't heard??
Probably, you aren't still ready! ~ Deyth Banger

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

It's not given even to the greatest writers to tell someone else's story. ~ Marty Rubin

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever. ~ Irwin Shaw

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong. ~ Walter Kirn

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories. ~ Nell Freudenberger

Writing is a lonely act. When two writers come together to write a horror story it can be crazy. You can't step on a mine and hope it doesn't explode. ~ Ben Oliveira

You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed. ~ Larry Niven

I'd like to give these detective story writers a course of routine work. They'd soon learn how most things are untraceable and nobody ever notices anything anywhere! ~ Agatha Christie

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading. ~ Will Eisner

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space. ~ Julio Cortazar

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one ... ~ Lawrence Block

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today. ~ Bradley Sands

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met. ~ Mary Karr

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. ~ Alice Munro

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. ~ Julio Cortazar

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling. ~ Julio Cortazar

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story. ~ Eric Brown

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially. ~ Ray Bradbury

Detective-story writers give this thrill by exploiting the resources of the possible; however improbable the happenings in a detective story, they can and must be explained in terms that satisfy the reason. But in a ghost story, where natural laws are dispensed with, the whole point is that the happenings cannot be so explained.
A ghost story that is capable of a rational explanation is as much an anomaly as a detective story that isn't.
The one is in revolt against a materialistic conception of the universe, whereas the other depends on it. ~ L.P. Hartley

The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story. ~ Carol Bly

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears. ~ Orson Scott Card

Actually the city editor was one of the gentlest, most soft-spoken men I have ever encountered, and he did me a service I have always been grateful for. I got stuck one day on a story and finally, with the desperation of youth, I took my problem to him, although it seemed cheeky to bother him. How was I to express a certain thing? … I asked him how I could get around my difficulty.

He thought for a minute. Then he said, 'Just say the words'. ~ E.B. White

I love stories about two people who are doing illegal things, who we really enjoy watching despite the fact that we know they are doomed in some way. ~ Famke Janssen

You may give up your big dream and that is very hard! If necessary, give it up but then create a new one! Never live without big dreams because they will keep you alive in life! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Wherever you are, wherever you go, be sure to spread the light. ~ A.D. Posey

A Dom intent on developing a relationship will approach you on a personal level first. ~ Red Phoenix

At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddle it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them into depressives, and would still have some left over. Because he no longer knew what to do with so much sadness. And sometimes he didn't even know what to do with himself. ~ Filippo Bologna

You see people, you judge. It's just the human thing to do - good or bad, it's a fact. Like when you get a coffee at Starbucks and the person is rude to you. My mom always says, 'Yeah, but you don't know what kind of day they're having.' You don't know the back-story, and that's why it's so fun to be an actor and to get into the back-story. ~ Nicola Peltz

What I'm trying to say is that you don't understand a man until you understand what makes him do what he does. Every man is a hero in his own story, Princess. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Come on, Oliver. I'm saying no."

"Is it a fake no? Because your body keeps saying yes."

"My body doesn't know anything."

"What does your heart say?"

"That's number one on my list of unenlightened organs. It believes anything it hears. It's screwed up in some way. ~ Elisa Marie Hopkins

Facts are important, but the story matters. Poorly presented facts can even get in the way of the story's impact. ~ Blake Mycoskie

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too. ~ Tobias Wolff

Nothing she says or does would surprise me." Gideon faced the helm once more, putting his back to Barnaby. He wasn't about to go anywhere near Sara again, not the way he was feeling now. Let Barnaby deal with her today.
"Maybe not, but that doesn't mean it's nothing to worry about. You've got more schooling than I have, but isn't Lysistrata the play where the women refuse to have relations with their husbands until the men agree to stop going to war?"
With a groan, Gideon clenched the wheel. Lysistrata was among the many words of literature his father had forced down his throat once he was old enough to read. "Yes. But don't try to tell me she's teaching them that. It's Greek, for god's sake. They wouldn't understand a word, even if she knew it well enough to recite it."
"She knows it well enough to give them a free translation, I assure you. When I left her she was telling them the story with great enthusiasm."
Barnaby reached for the helm when Gideon swung away from it with an oath. "I should never have taken her aboard," he grumbled as he strode for the ladder. "I should have sent her back to England gagged and bound! ~ Sabrina Jeffries

There was too much opinion in this country, too many sob stories. Nobody wanted to put a lid on anything; everyone wanted to say it all, about everything. If you as much as said hello to someone on a train or a plane, you were in for the unexpurgated memoirs. Nehru in 1947 had declared us a nation finding utterance - but in fifty years the utterance had become a mad clamour, a crazed babble, an unending howl. We were a nation of Scheherzades, afraid we'd die if, for a moment, we shut up. For myself, I'd mastered a face of steel, and an inscrutable nod. It did not always shut everyone up, but it did to some extent dam the ghastly flow. ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

So, let's all take one more step. We have learned to love ourselves, so now I urge you to speak yourself.

I would like to ask all of you. What is your name? What excites you and makes your heart beat?

Tell me your story. I want to hear your voice, and I want to hear your conviction. No matter who you are, where you're from, your skin colour, gender identity: speak yourself.

Find your name, find your voice by speaking yourself. ~ Kim Namjoon

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. ~ Jennifer Egan

Our story is the only thing we have that is completely our own. A person who steals it and uses it to entertain is the worst kind of thief. Then ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

The story of the angel announcing what the church calls the immaculate conception, is not so much as mentioned in the books ascribed to Mark, and John; and is differently related in Matthew and Luke. The former says the angel, appeared to Joseph; the latter says, it was to Mary; but either Joseph or Mary was the worst evidence that could have been thought of; for it was others that should have testified for them, and not they for themselves. Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why then are we to believe the same thing of another girl whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where? How strange and inconsistent is it, that the same circumstance that would weaken the belief even of a probable story, should be given as a motive for believing this one, that has upon the face of it every token of absolute impossibility and imposture. ~ Thomas Paine

Buddha's Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader's attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become -- or are we already -- a nation of performers with no audience? ~ Heidi Pitlor

With 'The Social Network,' I got into it at first because frankly I thought there was a cool courtroom drama to be had with the intellectual properties. And then what further drew me in was that the most extraordinary social networking device ever created was created by the world's most antisocial person. I liked that story. ~ Aaron Sorkin

Perhaps one of the writer's tasks is to weave himself into others' pain. ~ Julius Lester

I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations ... English from Edwardian times. ~ Sandra Cisneros

There was much more she would have liked to tell her brother. But within a few months, she would be able to tell him in person. When he learned of the attack on the airship, nothing would stop Archimedes and his wife from coming. But at least they would fly to the Red City instead of Krakentown, where he might be recognized as the smuggler Wolfram Gunther-Baptiste. One day, she might write a story inspired by that part of his career. She would call it The Idiot Smuggler Who Destroyed the Horde Rebellion's War Machines and Changed His Name to Avoid the Rebel Assassins. Zenobia would take pity on the idiot's sister and leave her out of the tale. She ~ Meljean Brook

My life story is something obviously that belongs to me very personally. And the fact of the matter is that I had choices and chances and opportunities that were provided to me, based on the way I was able to direct my own decision-making. And what I'm working to fight for is to make sure that all women have the ability to do that. ~ Barack Obama

Only the scenario writers are exempt. These are tied between the tails of two spirited Caucasian ponies, which are then driven off in opposite directions. This custom is called a conference. ~ S.J Perelman

Now, to tell my story
if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,
I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends. ~ Charles Kingsley

According to Q-Jo, the whole tarot deck, or at least the twenty-two trump cards of the Major Arcana, may be read as the Fool's journey. "On one important level," she explained, "the major cards are chapters in the story of a quest. I'm talking the universal human quest for understanding and divine reunion. And it doesn't matter whether the quest starts with the Fool or ends with him, because it's a loop anyhow, a cycle endlessly repeated. When the naive young Fool finally tumbles over the precipice, he falls into the world of experience. Now his journey has really begun. Along the way, he'll meet all the teachers and tempters - the tempters are teachers, too - and challenging situations that a person is likely to meet in the task of his or her growing. The Fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the fool. A lot of folks don't know what's in that bag they're carrying. And they're all too willing to trade it for cash. Inside the bag, the have every tool they need to facilitate their life's journey, but they won't even open it up and glance inside. Subconsciously, the goal of all of us out-of-control primates is essentially the same, but let me assure you of this: the only ones who'll ever reach that goal are the ones who have the courage to make fools of themselves along the way. ~ Tom Robbins

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps. ~ Elizabeth George

Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories. ~ Tea Obreht

To make a long story short, there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. It's not simply that no one has bothered to do it
it's inherently impossible even if one tried. So where does all this leave the dogma of equal complexity? When Joe, Piers, and Tom claim that "primitive people speak primitive languages," they are making a simple and eminently meaningful statement, which just happens to be factually incorrect. But the article of faith that linguists swear by is even worse than wrong
it is meaningless. The alleged central finding of the discipline is nothing more than a hollow mouthful of air, since in the absence of a definition for the overall complexity of a language, the statement that "all languages are equally complex" makes about as much sense as the assertion that "all languages are equally cornflakes". ~ Guy Deutscher

We can never change the story that made us what we are. It's a story accumulated by the manifold complexities-its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got; all that we got but never wanted; all that was found and lost. ~ Douglas Kennedy