#stories

"It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know."

"What doesn't kill us makes us funnier."

"The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well."

"Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories"

"Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves."

"Literature is the real life of imaginary people."

"Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth."

"Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke."

"Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not."

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."

"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving."

"That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."

"All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!"

"The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth."

"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story."

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open."

"The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

"After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels."

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

"Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written."