I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.
Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
Most of us get our history through story.
Stories – individual stories, family stories, national stories – are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
I have a story that will make you believe in God.
I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.
Someday I’ll be remembered for The phone calls I never made Letters I never mailed And the stories I never finished telling anyone.
Bad stories are written about me because the press knows they can make me into a weeping dog and few people will object.
The street and me is a love story. 1971 is a great date because, finally, fashion took to the street.
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Full stories are as rare as honesty.
The Indian story has never been written. Maybe I am the man to do it.
If you step out of a tenth story window you do not break the law of gravity, you confirm it.
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to ‘gamble’ on an unknown.
I know the responsibility that entails from telling a story. The one thing I despise the most is when I go to a movie and I see a whole bunch of lazy actors making me waste my time and money.