There’s no story that’s the start of itself.
Trust me, I’m telling you stories.
This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.
We are told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling.
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.
Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.
I tend to really enjoy being swept up in fiction. I love a good story and I admire fiction authors.
I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel’s conclusiveness – too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.
He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.
I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story.