When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.
I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.
The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.
I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories.
The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.
The difference between real life and a story is that life has , while a story must have . The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.
Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
Sometimes it's less about the character and more about the story for me. I'll play a rock in the background if I think the story is fantastic and I can be a part of it somehow. That's what I look for.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.
I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.
There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.
None of it made any sense to her - the deceit, the betrayal, the sheer chutzpah of it. Like something from a movie. Who in real life acted this way? But then she remembered this had happened in India, and India was not real life. The most heartbreaki...
A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding famili...
I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever h...
Firelight will not let you read fine stories but it's warm and you won't see the dust on the floor.
The denizens of Feyland find the absence of magic to be quite funny. I mean no offense. ” “None taken.” “For example – In the Land Over the Crystal River (for that's how we refer to humans), there was once a man and a woman. And the man was...
She says, "I'll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me." Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us — just her supporting cast. Mrs. Clark, leading us, she looks back...
New Rule: Since Glenn Beck is clearly onto us, liberals must launch our plan for socialist domination immediately. Listen closely, comrades, I've received word from General Soros and our partners in the UN--Operation Streisand is a go. Markos Moulits...
Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the freedom the author claims for herself must be shared w...
