#storytelling

"Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both."

"Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages."

"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."

"You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift."

"[I]t is the wine that leads me on,the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs,laugh like a fool – it drives theman to dancing... it eventempts him to blurt out storiesbetter never told."

"You can fix anything but a blank page."

"This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever."

"In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success"

"Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river."

"I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read."

"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."

"But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it."

"I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story."

"Film gives us a second chance at a first impression."

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams..."

"Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us."

"There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth."

"Every great love starts with a great story..."

"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."