Writing Stories Quotes

I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it. ~ Joan Larkin

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it. ~ Nick Earls

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid ... initially and my own stories. ~ Peter Morgan

I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know? ~ Dorothea Benton Frank

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest. ~ Aimee Bender

Writing stories has given me the power to change things I could not change as a child. I can make boys into doctors. I can make fathers stop drinking. I can make mothers stay. ~ Cynthia Rylant

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground. ~ Rodman Philbrick

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing. ~ Alice Munro

Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. ~ J. Nozipo Maraire

When you're a writer, you have to write these stories, even if you don't get paid ~ Horton Foote

Sometimes ... it takes me an entire day to write a recipe, to communicate it correctly. It's really like writing a little short story. ~ Julia Child

Life takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story, and along the way, we start to realize we are not the author. ~ Barack Obama

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write. ~ Doreen Cronin

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes. ~ Scarlett Thomas

I've been writing stories since I was a kid. I love writing stories. ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure. ~ Sara Sheridan

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story, ~ Elmore Leonard

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask. ~ Sean O Faolain

Don't get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn't the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam. ~ Tom Johnson

Don't ever let anyone else write your story for you. ~ Nick Carter

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork. ~ G. Willow Wilson

All the things that live within you find their place, in character and story, once you tap into that other space that is the creative writing space. ~ Francesca Gregorini

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell. ~ Lily King

The stories that are too personally vulnerable to write are the ones that must be told. ~ Mat Kearney

I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets. ~ Tess Gerritsen

I started writing stories as a child. ~ Danielle Steel

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can't help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is. ~ Haruki Murakami

To survive, you must tell stories. ~ Umberto Eco

If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing. ~ Ray Bradbury

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life. I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood - for how it came about and for what it led to. ~ Elif Batuman

I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much. ~ Robert Barry

He's a hot bath, a short breath, five days of summer pressed into five fingers writing stories on my body. ~ Tahereh Mafi

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene. ~ Roger Zelazny

But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create. ~ Patricia Cornwell

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time. ~ Stephen King

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

Without language we have no past, the present is unquantifiable, and we lack a means to recognize and express the paradoxical future challenges of humanity. In absence of a shared language, we cannot understand prior generation's conflicts, desires, and achievements, nor can we communicate with future generations our essential values and the wisdom we garner through undergoing our own socioeconomic crises ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Improvise. Write your own damn story. ~ Eric Lange

When I write a story, it's not like I'm thinking about what I'm doing ~ Stephenie Meyer

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses." ~ Philip Pullman

I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word. ~ Kristen Stewart

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one. ~ Grace Paley

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. ~ Susan Sontag

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons. ~ Rick Riordan

Us writers all like each other and want to write stories with each other; we're having a good time. ~ Charles Soule

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

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work. ~ Bruce Chatwin

I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. ~ Haruki Murakami

Nobody cooks using just one ingredient. Why would you write using just one flavor of story? ~ Patrick Rothfuss

I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories. ~ Damon Lindelof

But what is it, to be an artist? Nothing shows up the general human dislike of thinking, and man's innate craving to be comfortable, better than his attitude to this question. When these worthy people are affected by a work of art, they humbly say that that sort of thing is a 'gift.' And because in their innocence they assume that beautiful and uplifting results must have beautiful and uplifting causes, they never dream that the 'gift' in question is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.
[...]
Listen to this. I know a banker, grey-haired business man, who has a gift for
writing stories. He employs this gift in his idle hours, and some of his stories are of the
first rank. But despiteI say despite-this excellent gift his withers are by no means
unwrung: on the contrary, he has had to serve a prison sentence, on anything but trifling
grounds. Yes, it was actually first in prison that he became conscious of his gift, and his
experiences as a convict are the main theme in all his works. One might be rash enough
to conclude that a man has to be at home in some kind of jail in order to become a poet. ~ Thomas Mann

Storytelling connects us with all of humanity. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music. ~ Bat For Lashes

Writers need restrictions. If somebody just says, "Hey, do you want to write a novel, or an article, or a movie, or a short story, you get shut down." ~ Mitchell Hurwitz

We really did it write it for the story but once you get into production, once you start doing this process certain things will jump out at you. Some shots will be more 3-D than others. ~ Todd Farmer

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it. ~ Isabel Allende

The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise. ~ Alan Moore

I didn't know how story worked. So, when writing the screenplay, people introduced me to the science of it. And I'm grateful. I'll probably use that information for the rest of my career, in terms of writing novels or writing stories. And then, of course, to help me live a better story, a more meaningful story ~ Donald Miller

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Experience is the catalyst for all great stories. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I always wanted to write a story about a couple coming to that moment in their relationship where either they keep on going or it ends. ~ Julie Delpy

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists. ~ V.S. Pritchett

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it. ~ Michael Ondaatje

You have to live your story before being able to write your story. ~ Amy Shearn

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse. ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write. ~ John Cheever

Those crazy physicists that spend all day cooking themselves under an atomic reactor and all night writing stories for Weird World have done it. Spoiled my day completely. One of those idiots has hung the world up like a celluloid ball in an airstream. ~ Shirley Jackson

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story. ~ Eudora Welty

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal. ~ Dave Eggers

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, Just as long as he finishes the book. ~ Roald Dahl

If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories. ~ James M. Cain

I started writing stories in my spare time. ~ Ken Follett

I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories. ~ Christine Feehan

Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough ~ Joy Williams

Writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling. ~ Ann Patchett

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier. ~ Karen Russell

I've been writing stories, in one form or another, since I was a kid. ~ Cullen Bunn

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today, ~ Mark Haddon

Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you. ~ Scott Westerfeld

F you want to be famous then run for office and be a politician. If you want to be rich then become a plastic surgeon. If you want to have people know your name then be a teacher. If you want to make a difference in someone's life then have children. But if you want to work alone, feel like a freak, be misunderstood, wonder what the point is, always come up short of time and money, while writing stories that bubble up from within about characters you have never met but are strangely in love with, then be a writer. ~ Karen Jones Gowen

Did you know that writing stories down kills them?
Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things. ~ N.K. Jemisin

When we deny our stories, They define us. When we own our stories, we get to write the ending. ~ Brene Brown

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. ~ Eudora Welty

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan's request? Couldn't Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.
Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term "fire" exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of "seditious roots" that could "dynamite the world" the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling - out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies. ~ L.L. Barkat

Writing stories is a type of magic too. ~ Cornelia Funke

When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me. ~ Janet Evanovich

Writing stories is like making love. --from Creating Juicy Tales ~ June Gillam

I can write my own stories and I can write myself in. ~ Octavia Butler

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story. ~ Stephen King

A story to me must have some surprise ... I must have a passion to write the story. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Stories heal us because we become whole through them. In the process of writing, of discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden, and we come to understand that stories heal. ~ Deena Metzger

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene? ~ Edan Lepucki

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy. ~ William, Saroyan

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else. ~ Tobias Wolff

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story. ~ Ethan Canin