The Best Stories Quotes

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile. It looks beautiful, but soulless. So I warn them that, often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say . . . And you say, "It's so well-written, but who gives a fuck?" For certain, the guy who wrote it doesn't give a fuck. It's not something that has to do with his life; it's just something well-written and illuminating, and writing is not about that. The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about . . .

Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws. Why do we have to keep playing this strange game? ~ Etgar Keret

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. ~ Tobias Wolff

From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories. ~ Andrew Davies

In the best stories, the heroes always give their lives, for honour, duty, sacrifice and the glory of the empire. Anything less and it is not much of a story at all. ~ Julie Kagawa

The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus. ~ Robert Galbraith

The theatre is a world in itself. The possibility for creating experiences that move people is increased many times over. In the end, the best stories are usually about a battle of good over evil - that has never changed. ~ Cat Stevens

On TV, stories and events are finalized in 30 or 60 minutes, or neatly tied up after a season or two. The best stories are the ones that force us to come to our own conclusions and to explain why we believe in our conclusions. ~ Lurlene McDaniel

True stories are the best stories. ~ Burbuqe Raufi

The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Comedic actors can be looked at as a lower form because we have to put ourselves in a lower place than most of the audience. I think lofty emotions are somehow considered more special. The best stories in the world to me are the ones that elicit a real emotion, but have humour. ~ Jim Carrey

Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories. ~ Alice Hoffman

[The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented ...
Faulkner in the University, 117 ~ William Faulkner

The best stories are often true ... The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries. ~ Shonda Rhimes

The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea. ~ Kenneth Grahame

The best stories come out of the truth. ~ Ridley Scott

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made-up. ~ Fredrik Backman

I look for a good story. Usually the best stories are the ones that are unbelievably true. 'Soul Surfer' is one of those stories. ~ Dennis Quaid

I'm a true opera buff. Operas make the best stories. ~ Andrea Davis Pinkney

The best stories are the ones that are still to come... Close enough to hear, smell, and admire. Yet out of reach. ~ Shubhangi Swarup

When you're telling a story, the best stories, every character has an arc. Every one. And that arc is usually about finding yourself, or about at least finding something about yourself that you didn't know. ~ Roy Conli

The best stories ever written are the these were inspired by it endings. ~ Sameh Elsayed

But the best stories were about their mother, how her hair was as red as blood, how she had seventy-four freckles on her face, how she was a ferryboat captain's daughter who believed that people could fly. ~ Alice Hoffman

Some of the best stories that I've gotten, that others have written about this administration, about the previous administration, you have to rely on anonymous sources. ~ Michael Isikoff

I am expecting that consumers are going to continue and exert power and influence. The idea of radical transparency is something that few brands are taking advantage of now, and most brands fight it. I'd say that in 10 years the best brands won't be those with the best stories, sort of made up fictional stories, but those that will give an accurate and real time picture of what they are doing in the interest of the consumer, in any given time. ~ Alex Bogusky

Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure. ~ Josh Rose

The best stories, however, are living things, and as much as we may cherish the original, the true act of love comes in the retelling. ~ Anne Boyd Rioux

It starts with my mother ... .Boys get fucked up by their fathers, right? That's why so many tales are really Daddy Issue stories at their core, because men run the world, and men get to tell their stories first. If women told most of the stories, though, then all the best stories would be about Mommy Problems. ~ Chuck Wendig

The Gospel, because it is a true story, means all the best stories will be proved, in the ultimate sense, true. THE ~ Timothy J. Keller

'Cosmos' wouldn't deserve its place in primetime evening network television were it not a landscape on which compelling stories were told. People, when they watch TV in the evening, want to see stories, and science simply tells the best stories. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Endings are what gives stories meaning.

I think the whole story has meaning but I also think to have a whole story-shaped story it needs some sort of resolution. Not even a resolution, some appropriate place to leave it. A goodbye. I think the best stories feel like they're still going, somewhere, out in story space. ~ Erin Morgenstern

The best stories are about a character who has a goal or noble quest and goes through hell to get it. Do you have a goal or quest like that in real life? Why not? ~ Kenneth Wayne Wood

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history. ~ Tony Kushner

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room. ~ Pete Hamill

You're a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."

"Beautiful and full of monsters?"

"All the best stories are. ~ Laini Taylor

We, as producers, want to tell the best stories. We want to tell the stories that people will talk about. ~ Todd Lieberman

The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy. ~ A.D. Posey

The best stories are those dreams yet to be written.

~ Taken from King Eli, To the Ends of the Earth. ~ C.M. Padilla

I want people to read them and enjoy the experience and feel entertained. A lot of the best stories revolve around strange people, people whose decisions and logic and circumstances are not easily understood. ~ Arthur Bradford

Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Still, when I read the story, I felt like I'd written half of it myself, and the author guy was responsible for the other half. And when the two halves came together it was like the end of amnesia and all the memories came flooding back. The best stories are like that. They're like spaceships. they take you somewhere far away and you think, oh, what a weird place. But then you think, wait, maybe I've been here before. Maybe I was even born here. ~ Victor Lodato

The best stories (whether book or movie) involve redemption. If you are someone who believes you have made too many mistakes or your life has been too "bad" for God to want you, think of it this way: God, the greatest story teller, has not yet finished your story, and He can make it a really great story by including a really great redemption. All of us, in truth, need a really great redemption, which means, through Jesus, all of us have a really great story. ~ Donna E. Lane

Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. ~ Terry Teachout

The best stories infuse wonder, ~ Andrew Stanton

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

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person. ~ Russell Smith

It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable ... What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck. ~ Amy Tan

Let the best stories you tell be of your own life. ~ Rebecca Donovan

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good. ~ Leo Tolstoy

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality, the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. ~ Arthur Christopher Benson

More and more of our finest actors are finding room for themselves in the world of television - but I truly believe it's because some of the best stories are being told there. ~ Jeffrey Dean Morgan

The devil tells the best stories. ~ Patrick Ness

The best stories are the ones with the unexpected plot twists that no one would have guessed, even the writer. ~ Shannon L. Alder

The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash. ~ Tom DeMarco

Well I was born to run, to get ahead of the rest. And all that I wanted was to be the best Just to feel free and be someone I was born to be fast, I was born to run . ~ Emmylou Harris

My name is not 'The Best Player in Baseball.' My name is George Kenneth Griffey, Jr. ~ Ken Griffey, Jr.

Elderly witches and wizards still use the saying 'I'll take Cadogan's pony' to mean, 'I'll salvage the best I can from a tricky situation'. ~ J.K. Rowling

I think the best way to become a character is by osmosis as opposed to thinking directly about stuff. ~ Theo James

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest - and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura - and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant. ~ Richard Flanagan

Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Not all options will be good ones. Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad lot and ride the storm. ~ Robert Jordan

Lord, whatever You ask of me, I will do ... . Whatever You send or allow in my life, I will accept ... . With Your help I will endeavor to put the best things before good things ... . I present all that I am to You as a slave to Your purposes ... . I surrender it all to You. Amen. ~ Kurt Bjorklund

What is the best method of appeasing an offended party? Would it not be to give some ground to them, acknowledge what they have done right? ~ Robert Jordan

The worst thing you can do is to hate someone. The best thing you can do is to totally love someone without expectations. ~ Debasish Mridha

Helping people boost themselves out of poverty is the best way to make a lasting positive difference in a person's life. ~ Naveen Jain

The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them ~ Charles Bukowski

I believe that women make some of the best leaders. ~ Amy Klobuchar

- What were you thinking about, child?
- I was thinking of heaven.
- It's unnecessary for you to think of heaven: there's already enough to consider about earth. Are you tired of living, you who have barely been born?
- No, but everyone prefers heaven to earth.
- Well, not I. For since heaven, as well as earth, has been made by God, you may count on encountering up there the very same evils as here below. After your death, you will not be rewarded according to your deserts, for if injustices are done you on this earth (as you will find out later by experience) there is no reason why, in the next life, you will not be further wronged. The best thing for you to do is not think of God, and since it is refused you, to make your own justice. ~ Comte De Lautreamont

The best thing about candy is that it can't be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent. ~ Rosecrans Baldwin

Nearly 30,000 fans turned out to support the tribute match and provide one of the best atmospheres at the ground for ages. I was so happy to be part of it. ~ David Ginola

I enjoy trying to figure out the best way to compliment the picture and not overpower it. ~ David Duchovny

Do you think that's what love is? Not what they say on the front of those cheesy Valentine's cards you see in petrol stations - you complete me - but is it when someone has seen you at your worst but still looks at you like you're the best thing that's ever happened to them? I think it might be. ~ Tanya Byrne

Democracy is the best form of the worst type of government ~ Winston Churchill

The best revenge is true forgiveness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Sometimes painful endings bring the best new beginnings. ~ Shae Ross

Wherever you work, work hard and educate yourself continuously. You must never forget social welfare, ethics and honesty. However, there is no guarantee for your career progression. Therefore, don't expect that only the best people will be promoted. ~ Eraldo Banovac

I don't have the best self esteem; mine wavers month to month, but I know how to pick myself up. ~ Tyra Banks

The best practice you can get is on the bandstand, but in between gigs I feel I have to stay in shape. ~ Bill Bruford

The best way to put the Law of Giving into operation - to start the whole process of circulation - is to make a decision that any time you come into contact with anyone, you will give them something. ~ Deepak Chopra

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The first blessing is peace, as is agreed by all men who have even a small share of reason....The best general, therefore, is that one which is able to bring about peace from war. ~ Belisarius

As a woman, my style defines my leadership. It's a gentler, more compassionate approach. I consult, I listen and I compromise where it's in the best interest of the citizens. ~ Kamla Persad-Bissessar

Butch, you come from DeWitt Clinton. There are five thousand brothers in that school. You're the best there. You've been all-city two years in a row. How bad can you be? You come with me and we'll make nice music. ~ Al McGuire

I look at my grandparents and what they dealt with in the Japanese internment in Arizona. That sense of perseverance, of making the best out of an incredibly bad situation, has always been something I drew inspiration from. I always ask myself, 'What in the world do I have to complain about?' ~ Scott Fujita

If you can find your footing between two cultures, sometimes you can have the best of both worlds. ~ Randy Pausch

Negotiating means getting the best of your opponent. ~ Marvin Gaye

The best way to drive performance in an organization is to create an environment in which information can flow freely, mistakes can be highlighted and help can be offered and received. ~ Simon Sinek

I discovered years ago that the best results in this respect could be gained by running 100 miles weekly at my near best aerobic efforts and that, supplementary to this, running as many easy miles as I could ~ Arthur Lydiard

You draw the best things from your parents and family. You're going to pick up some of the bad things as well - there's a temper that runs through my dad's side of the family that I'm not especially keen on picking up a giant block of. ~ Mark Ronson

They were good friends, weren't they? The best of friends. She ought to be able to walk into his room and ask him the reason for his absence this evening - and the reason for his absence from her bed.
But she couldn't, because it was all a sham, their friendship, at least on her part, a disguise for her true feelings, an awful solace for not being his one and only.
A thing without wings. ~ Sherry Thomas

I directed a half hour comedy pilot, 'Upgrade,' and had one of the best times ever! I had such a great time directing; I would love to get to direct another project. ~ Daniella Alonso

I don't think there are any rules in real face-to-face relationships or interactions. I think authenticity and being yourself is always, without a doubt, the best plan of action. Things happen differently when you're actually here, so you can't put out a general guideline that's gonna show up in text and be interpreted. There are no rules. Just be yourself. ~ Zac Efron

My mother is black and my father is Filipino. I got the best of both worlds. ~ Cassie Ventura

I view it as a real competition. We're in a business where, you know what, there's no babies here. You go out, win the job and take it. I've been told by management, for the most part, that we're going to play the best people. Obviously, you've got to consider stuff like contracts - that's a reality of the game. But still, when it gets down to it, we're going to try and pick the guy that deserves to win the job. ~ Willie Randolph

I am the best dancer ever. I am a superstar. The shoes are magic. My feet are magic. I am magic. ~ Jennifer Niven

It's often the worst of you that brings out the best of you ~ Thabiso Monkoe

Know the best thing about being dismissed as an insatiable whore? People don't mind their tongues around you. I've learned more information eavesdropping while I was mid-orgy than I have from spying on G7 summits, but that's off topic. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles. ~ Don Marquis

As for being much known by sight, and pointed out, I cannot comprehend the honor that lies withal; whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor. ~ Abraham Cowley