“Confrontation affords you the opportunity to hear the other side of the story.”
“The bigger the dream, the better the story.”
“A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that s all forehead doesn t amount to much.”
“Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.”
“The space between the private and the public is the nexus of the personal and the social, if not political. It’s where we meet the strong or subtle cultural censors who attempt to define what community, race, class, or gender can or cannot speak, to tell us which stories are told and valued and which are not. In short, it’s where we’re reminded of the power of personal stories and the power of the storyteller.”
“The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them. . .”
“Who lives inside your head? The hero of your story OR The victim of someone else s?”
“It’s the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don’t you?”
“You don’t need to be a poet, a performer, a writer, or a journalist to tell your story powerfully. You do, however, need to elevate your language in ways that will bring your story to life clearly and imaginatively for others.”
“An inclusive narrative structure provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of mind. A story well told, containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions, and thoughts flavored with emotion, connects people ad integrates neural networks”
“Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.”
“This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.”
“If the institution of mathematics told a story . . . how would it end?”
“The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn t so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.”
“He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.”
“Every good love story has a start and a finish. What matters is what happens in the middle.”
“There’s always a story that people are telling about themselves, and sometimes you can get them to tell it ever so slightly differently.”