The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.
Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
People who understand everything get no stories.
There is no story that is not true.
If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.
It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.
If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.
SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine.
READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in “dialect” and humor in slang.
STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue.
NOVEL, n. A short story padded...