If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.
We read books to find out who we are.
Story is king. Everything else is slave to story.
The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
Stories matter. Many stories matter.
It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.