I’ve yet to meet somebody who said, ‘Your stories are so revolting I couldn’t read them.’
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ninth graders with machine guns: its hard to make that a happy story.
I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems – but I knew she wanted to be married.
It’s easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device – recording and projecting.
I’ve seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn’t occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don’t feel like going back and dredging them up.
Our stories can set us free. When we set them free.
Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.
You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.
It’s important to tell your story. It’s important to listen.
At least the girls in stories were alive before they died.
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
If there’s any single talent a writer needs, it’s persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.
I was so worried that people wouldn’t like me or my story.
I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea – do I have to choose between the two?
Life is a B Movie: it’s stupid and it’s strange, it’s a directionless story, the dialogue is lame, but in the ‘he said she said’ sometimes there’s some poetry, if you turn your back long enough and let it happen naturally.