“words, you see, he said, looking at me again, allow us to make permanent what is essentially transient.Turn a world filled with injustice and hurt into a place that is beautiful and lyrical.”
“Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.”
“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” [Letter to Harrison Blake; November 16, 1857]”
“I do believe that some humans have more amazing lives than others–above all, those who don’t sit down in a chair like mere spectators letting their lives happen in front of them, but they take risks as heroes do, experiencing, living, becoming the main character—but no matter what, we all have at least one story to tell.”
“Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.”
“Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”
“...when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.”
“Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it s only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader s mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.”
“Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell as tory without transforming it in some way; it is part of the magic of storytelling. Like the troubadors of the past, who hid their messages in poems, songs and fairy tales, I too would hide my true purpose [ … ] It was by telling stories that I would save myself.”
“But as she continued and finished her tale, I could tell that her heart was elsewhere, and when she excused herself to go to bed, she left without saying good night. After that, the princesses in her stories were always beautiful. Always.”
“So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)”
“The pleasures of being a novelist are many. But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally within my own creative psyche. I m like a cat with untold lives, because each new book is my rebirth.”
“In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.”
“Writing nonfiction means I tell people s stories for them, not because they re special but because we all are.”
“There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. ”
“I think if a story has a message it should be incidental and accidental, otherwise it leans too close to indoctrination.”
“When I got home, I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not, I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was DEAD! Dead! cried his hearers. Dead! answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; dead as Fabian, the cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall! Go on, whispered the others, holding their breath. The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story. ( The Dead Man s Story”