The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.
J. K. RowlingI love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.
Paulo CoelhoWe can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.
Maya AngelouIf I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.
Kendrick LamarOne of the things I’ve never been accused of is not caring about people.
Joe BidenWhen I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?
Clint EastwoodI wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.
Angelina JolieFiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.
Karl Lagerfeld‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.
The WeekndNo matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.
Madeleine AlbrightLove is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.
Ray BradburyWhen I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
Haruki MurakamiDoing 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.
Anthony BourdainAnd all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.
Alexander PopeYour purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
Dale CarnegieI used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?
Ray BradburyI like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.
Anthony BourdainDon’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
Mark TwainI don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.
Amy WinehouseI love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.
Kevin HartSometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
Alice MunroYou see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.
Stephen KingWhat is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?
BuddhaAs a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.
Haruki MurakamiMy passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.
Kendrick LamarTell the truth, but tell it slant.
Emily DickinsonI don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.
Kurt VonnegutI’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘
Maya AngelouIt 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.
Harper LeePeople may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.
Steven WrightI don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
Maya AngelouMemory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice MunroIn a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.
J. K. RowlingAll fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.
Margaret AtwoodDon’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. LewisFiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
Margaret AtwoodSometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.
Albert SchweitzerFiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen KingI went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.
Lady GagaStories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
Paul AusterIf you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.
Margaret AtwoodWe’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
Jerry SeinfeldOf course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
Margaret ThatcherMy heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.
Haruki MurakamiIn the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.
Robert GreeneThe question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘
Mark ZuckerbergOn one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.
Fidel CastroTo the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.
Steven WrightAs I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.
Nipsey HussleBe amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.
Benjamin DisraeliMusic helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.
RihannaWe are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Albert SchweitzerI’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.
J. ColeNo tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Robert FrostNo, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen KingThe story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
Margaret AtwoodWith action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!
Dwayne JohnsonMany people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.
Haruki MurakamiHomer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Aristotle