When you are in the present moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love.
Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, “I am ruined” is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. “I have 50 cents left in my bank account” is a fact.
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.
Do not dump your woes upon people – keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them.
About the only value the story of my life may have is to show that one can, even without any particular gifts, overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable if one is willing to face the fact that they must be overcome.
Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.
Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God’s story never ends with ’ashes.
Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story.
Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?
Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story.
No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.
You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.
Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.
Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.
You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood.
I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.
Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.