“He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.”
“I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.”
“Every great love starts with a great story...”
“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
“There are books full of great writing that don t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don t be like the book-snobs who won t do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don t be like the play-it-safers who won t do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
“To hell with facts! We need stories!”
“[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing... it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.”
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
“This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.”
“I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.”
“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”
“Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I m not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there s a lot of bad stuff coming. ”
“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ”
“I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren t just entertainment. Don t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.”