For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are the se...
In almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.
(pl. ) of Story
The myths are dead. The gods are dead. The ghosts and ghouls and phantoms are dead. There is only the State, and the People.- No, Monsieur Robespierre. There is much more than that.
Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely...
Not everything is a love story.
Tell the story you want to tell, and let it be as long as it needs to be. Worry about marketing it later.
They both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends, and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:"Ma...
The universe is made of stories, not atoms!
Are infinite possibilities a storyteller's worst enemy or best friend? I'd say a bit of both really and one must be grateful for this paradox.
Stories choose us, not the other way around.
Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder...
ان الكلمات مثل العصافير ، تمضي طليقة دون نظام ولا وعي وبإمكان أي كان بقليل من السحر أن يحبسها ليتاجر بها
إن أغلب الناس قد عاشوا حدثًا واحدًا على الأقل خلال حياتهم يعد حدثًا فريدًا حقًا، ويصلح تمامًا لصياغته في قصة قصيرة.
When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in...
To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything. But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stori...
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)
There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the fe...
Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.
Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.