#stories

"Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?"

"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."

"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!"

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."

"Every game is winnable if you change your mind about what the prize should be and your perspective about the players at the table."

"...I like stories very much,” the priest said. “They help me understand myself better."

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

"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."

"Stories are psycho-diagnostic ― they diagnose the condition of our psyches. When we watch, read or hear a story, whatever detail jumps out reflects an issue in our psyche that requires our attention."

"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."

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

"A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth."

"It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor."

"Literature is the real life of imaginary people."

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

"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."

"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful."

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

"The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book."(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)"

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."