We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to. We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on...
I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewrite...
(pl. ) of Story
A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves u...
I am not here to compete in the war of words, I am here to nurture the future of stories.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is th...
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be k...
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.
But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be...
What he told himself on those sea-soaked nights...Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out ov...
Read the stories of the past to write your story for the future.
My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.
Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.
How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.
A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.
Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe.
Our stories always contain average, ordinary people. They are the most unsuspecting victims of all.
This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)