I generally write a first draft that’s pretty lean. Just get the story down.
The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character.
Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
The stories that you tell yourself can make or break you – no matter who you are.
Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.
My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.
If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.
What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple.
The story of one person is the story of all of humanity.
Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?
Feel the feelings and drop the story.
We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.
The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.
The whole of salvation history is the story of God looking for us: he offers us love and welcomes us with tenderness.
To wanna be me is to go through not just the good but the bad. You wanna share my story identically? Man, you gonna take some lumps.
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema.