I sign a film based on the story, the role I play, and the maker.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

Curb Your Enthusiasm set me up so perfectly. That was one of my favorite shows before I got on it. That started a whole different level of a story for me. I didn’t know how to process it until after I got on the show and realized what the purpose of it was.

I’m afraid one thing – I don’t like heights. Heights bug me out. I’m not cool with heights. I refuse to do a comedy show 12 stories up. I’m fearless about everything else.

Great stories resonate because they tap into universal truths; that’s the power of compelling characters

Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights.

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.

I really feel that from my heart that, no matter the number of best stories may exist in this world or on this very planet earth, I find only one story to be the real one, and that is the very story of escape.

Always keep in your mind the best stories you will always see in reality.

There were only a few stories worth telling, which is why they needed to be told over and over again, until everyone recognized them as his own experience.

After two stories, I blew out my light. The night was clear. My ceiling was the sky and an eyelash of the moon. By shifting from side to side, I made my hammock swing me into sleep.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

I’m more interested in plot than theme, but I hope my values find their way into my stories: kindness, sympathy, effort, and humor!

I think kids abandon stories all the time. They start stories and get frustrated or get a different, better idea. I think that it is more worthwhile to stick with a story and revise it and try to finish it than abandon ship. Revisions, for any writer, are the name of the game.

My love is for acting not money, so I only take on roles that I find challenging, in stories I find interesting.

You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn’t play that way. It’s about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.

Our stories don’t make their homes in heavy books. We hold our stories in our songs.

Trees can’t tell jokes. But we can certainly tell stories. And if all you hear is the whisper of leaves, don’t worry. Most trees are introverts at heart.

I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.

The best stories are the ones that make you think

When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name

Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies. Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.

The best stories are the ones that leave room for interpretation.

Every story is a journey, and every character is a traveler on that journey

I just distributed my first novel at 40 years old. Till at that point, I composed short stories

In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.

No formal course in fiction writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

I think the personal stories that I tell in my life, I think, sort of do add up to say that you can fail and fail and fail again and continue to move forward.

You can’t avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later.

We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.

I’ve been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I’ve been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I have a million story-lines for ‘Revenge’ and they never listen to me.

I think if you’re artistic in any way, you’re probably born with it. I guess it’s a talent that can be learned here and there, but I think the instinct to tell a story or to create something happens maybe in the womb.

I don’t get controversial, I don’t get political and I don’t tell you what to do with your life. I just go out there and tell some stories, and people can relate.

I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I’m alive and I’m living and I’m experiencing different things every day, the show will always change.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

George Lucas should have distributed the “source code” to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.

In order to realize the worth of the anchor we need to feel the stress of the storm.

That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.

True love stories never have endings.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

We are always at our best when compassion enables us to recognize the unique pressures and singular stories of the people on the other side of our conflicts.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.

What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories

I just think that pop music is very interesting in how it can reach so many people. I like that I can tell stories and I just wanted to be heard more, I guess. That’s why it’s pop, but in my mind I don’t really view my music as pop, I don’t really view it as anything. I just look at it as a picture, I like visuals.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‘Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.’ I don’t want to be part of that.

A yokel mind loves stories from of old, Being the kind it can repeat and hold.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.

I would never exchange my life with anybody else’s.

Stop whining.

I see all art as a complement to telling people’s stories. I’m in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person’s story.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

I’m not great at adulting, but I’m an expert at turning bad decisions into great stories.

The story of practically every great fortune starts with the day when a creator of ideas and a seller of ideas got together and worked in harmony

I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they’ve been part of my education as a woman.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love a good, you know, I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they’ve been part of my education as a woman.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them

I have never lived more than four years in any one place and always have to ask ‘Which one?’ when a stranger greets me by saying, ‘I’m from your home town

Oh, stop! stop! I beg of you: what is sport to you is death to us

The Oxen and the Axle-Trees A HEAVY WAGON was being dragged along a country lane by a team of Oxen. The Axle-trees groaned and creaked terribly; whereupon the Oxen, turning round, thus addressed the wheels: “Hullo there! why do you make so much noise? We bear all the labor, and we, not you, ought to cry out.” Those who suffer most cry out the least.

I got the beer belly. You got the Fritos belly

Seeing is better than being blind, even when seeing hurts.

I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has

We need to share our stories so that global mental health no longer resides and festers in the darkness.

The more we share our stories— through words or pictures, music or drama— the kinder our world will be.