Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I love stories about women.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

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

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish. They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.

When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn’t eat or sleep.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I’m sticking to the script, I’m putting that organic feeling back in the game.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.