Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.
Was their love worth the erasure of the world and all its stories?
Mortality is the most romantic story ever told. Just one chance to do everything you should. Then, magically, you move on.
I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.
A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story – and it’s my job to attend to what it wants to do.
All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.
Just finished ‘Secrecy’ – truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense – but much more than both.
Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”
I’m with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can’t characterize them any better than that.
The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.
I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.
I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we’ve got, which is “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” I told those stories many, many times.
Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.
Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.
For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn’t, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
There’s a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.
I think probably I’m quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I’m very embarrassed by sentiment. I’m very embarrassed by corniness.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.