“As far as I’m concerned, story is everything. It is why we get up in the morning and how we choose who to take to bed at night. Story is the thread that weaves together the very fabric of reality.”
“I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn t anyone?”
“For impact, tell your true story -challenges, victory, all. Build hope by helping others find themselves by your story.”
“Writing Tip: Don t let the writing rules bog you down when you re writing the first draft; they don t matter when you re writing the story, only when you re editing the story.”
“Once you realize your past is just a story, it no longer has any power over you.”
“Story to me is life. It’s purpose. We as humans have an the opportunity and obligation to live the most truthful story ever told, unfortunately so few ever live truthfully. They don’t follow their dreams and live lives filled with regrets and “what ifs”. I make it my purpose to pursue the dreams and life that I want. It’s very hard, but at the end of the day, when people read the story of my life, they will say, “He was true to himself”.”
“Some people love their story that much even if it s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don t know how to stop telling it. Maybe it s about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself”
“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
“You re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no.”
“As children , wrote Alice Raikes (Mrs. Wilson Fox) in The Times, January 22, 1932, we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, So you are another Alice. I m very found of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling? We followed him into his house which opened, as ours did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner. Now , he said giving me an orange, first tell me which hand you have got that in. The right I said. Now , he said, go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in. After some perplexed contemplation, I said, The left hand. Exactly, he said, and how do you explain that? I couldn t explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn t the orange still be in my right hand? I can remember his laugh. Well done, little Alice, he said. The best answer I ve heard yet. I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.”
“And you’re disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story.”
“Everyone today has a story; the world’s an archive.”
“I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress. One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine.”
“In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.”
“His story is simple, because simple is always best.”
“It s fiction, the improbable is very probable in my worlds”
“One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”