People 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 WrightThe Canteen Boy, the reason you feel bad for him and you can laugh is because he, and I guess a lot of my characters, they don’t notice they’re getting made fun of. So they’ll say something back that’s not that great a quip, but in their mind they won the argument.
Adam SandlerI think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.
Ray BradburyI 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.
Kurt VonnegutI 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 GagaMusic 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.
RihannaI love stories about women.
Clint EastwoodI love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.
Kevin HartMost country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.
Dolly PartonAs 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 HussleI’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.
Brene BrownFor an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
Jean-Paul SartreJournalism keeps you planted in the earth.
Ray BradburyTell the truth, but tell it slant.
Emily DickinsonFor an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.
Terry PratchettI now have two different audiences. There’s the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.
Jackie ChanThere’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.
Margaret AtwoodIn Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.
Haruki MurakamiWhy do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.
Alice MunroFor me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.
Haruki MurakamiAs a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.
Frank OceanAlmost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia WoolfThe story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
Margaret AtwoodThe idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya AngelouI guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.
David BowieI have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.
AuroraWhen I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.
Taylor SwiftPeople think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.
Billie EilishWhen I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.
Paul AusterWhat is history but a fable agreed upon?
Napoleon BonaparteI want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.
Maya AngelouHow we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.
Frank OceanMy passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.
Kendrick LamarI 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 intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.
Nipsey HussleI have definitely been curious and involved in the process; even as a young actor. I was always looking at where the camera was, what story it was telling. And as my experience grew, I wanted to know even more.
Keanu ReevesA properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‚Harry Potter“s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.
Jordan PetersonI’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.
Matthew McConaugheyYour 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 CarnegieTo take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.
Maya AngelouI hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.
Elvis PresleyI’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.
Joyce MeyerI’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.
Anthony BourdainThere can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
Terry PratchettI love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.
Kevin HartIn my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
Haruki MurakamiI would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.
Taylor SwiftWhen writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest HemingwayI’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?
Alice WalkerI love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.
Matthew McConaugheyI have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
Tennessee WilliamsFacebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.
Mark ZuckerbergI’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
Margaret AtwoodIn my career as a director, there’s always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: ‚What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?‘ At that time you have to say: ‚OK, forget that and just go ahead.‘
Clint EastwoodThere is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya AngelouI’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.
Dolly PartonThe secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.
George LucasMy stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Ray BradburyMany 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 MurakamiMy own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.
Terry Pratchett