I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.
I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.
Never hold resentments for the person who tells you what you need to hear; count them among your truest, most caring, and valuable friends.
People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another. ("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1)
Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.
Some stories are rooted in adventure, some in strife. Others are born of the heart, and the horrors and the joys locked therein are often immeasurable, and make us truly wonder what became of those children we once were.
These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.
The erotic is not about nudity and nudity is rarely erotic. The erotic is subtle, a feeling, a gesture, a mood, a story frozen in the moment that holds you breathless waiting for the next moment. Understand this, and you understand the erotic.
This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.
I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.
You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger's life, and then they're content.
I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.
Have you ever experienced a beauty of soul, an esthetic grace, that was so intense it made you want to cry?" From Central Park Song ( A Screenplay )
Great stories build relationships and make people care. Those two things are necessary to change anything.
Sophie: "For the Create-A-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning her-self in a tub." Agatha: "I thought it was a better ending.
A good magician’s performance tells a story. Each act should build on the next, becoming ever more engaging to fill the audience with wonder. It’s a bud that unfurls into a flower, meant to woo the audience.
Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren't brothers. Plot points didn't leave behind grieving sisters who couldn't find their shoes.
What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure.
Don't just read words,' he would tell her as he held up the latest story, 'devour them. Let the words create new worlds.
