Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change. A company that stands still will soon be forgotten. Trying to provoke positive change is a principle we’ve embedded across the Virgin family for more than four decades.
We are the stories we tell ourselves.
Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.
Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
What marks a writer is this: until she – or he, of course – writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn’t really happened, it hasn’t shape, form, reality.
And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.
It is a weak thing to tell half your story, and then ask your friend’s advice-a still weaker thing to take it.
I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
In some way there is no real life. It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories – I think it’s evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
Literature is always something – it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good?
I’m not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I’m interested in who’s telling it and how they’re telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.