...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
I hope the story of 2011 is that America gets its mojo back. You've got to remember that America has the best universities; it's got some of the best businesses. It's got an unbelievable work ethic, rule of law. The story of 2011 will be America blos...
My daughter had carried within her a story that kept hurting her: Her dad abandoned her. She started telling herself a new story. Her dad had done the best he could. He wasn't capable of giving more. It had nothing to do with her. She could no longer...
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.
Compassion is born out of lovingkindness. It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.
I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the character back from whatever doom you've designed for them, you can tell the story, I suppose, honestly.
When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Ch...
My mother was a children's librarian. I remember when traditional stories were revised for modern audiences until they bore only a nodding acquaintance with the originals, but were released as 'authentic Indian stories' when they were, in fact, nothi...
In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gend...
So when you tell a joke, you want to make someone laugh, or if you tell a story about someone who had a heart attack, it may be because you want the listener to exercise. Stories are tools to create social cohesion and to get humans to strategize tog...
These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the telling of the old stories...We are grounded in its power...
Rather than doing the kind of fact-checking that normally goes with a story, you ran with certain stories for not wanting to get beat. There's a pressure that exists in your profession. I would be surprised in any honest exchange that you say that do...
But I like to listen to demos. I like to hear the finished product. It's like listening to a song - I mean, a story. If you're going to sit here and tell me a story, I just like to listen. I don't want to make them up.
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at a...
I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.
They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.
'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in sto...
