PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.
STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beats, and unforeseen elements within foreseen parameters.
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
When I find research really rewarding is when one piece of information gives you an idea for a story. That’s when it’s great.
You’re far from this. This story is just another few hundred pages of your mind.
I don’t really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn’t really. It’s just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Of course you’re real-like any thought or any story. It’s real when you’re in it.
I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.
What are we but our stories?
WARNING If you dare to read this story, you become part of the Experiment.
Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.
When I write I pretend I’m telling a story to someone in the room and I don’t want them to get up until I’m finished.
My style is colloquial storytelling. It’s the way we tell stories to one another – it’s not writerly, it’s not overdone.