Best 6566 quotes in «stories quotes» category

The first draft of a story is the writer's clay.

The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

The first rule of life is to reveal nothing, to be exceptionally cautious in what you say, in whatever company you may find yourself. If you have a secret, you have only to whisper it to your dearest friend with the strictest injunction that it will go no further, and within half a day the story is all over town, and when you do make what would seem to be a perfectly sensible remark, you will find it reported in the most grotesque form, thus incurring no end of criticism to rebound upon you.

The first step to finding a God-written love story is handing the pen to the true Author of romance.

The first series I wrote, 'L.A. Candy,' was always meant to be a three-book series, so when I started out it was all outlined that way and by the time I was done with the third book, I had become so involved and the process and the stories, I was a little bit sad to be done.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

The first syndicating I tried was when two partners and I created a production company in 1952. We wanted to syndicate famous Bible stories and sell them for $25 a show.

The first time you see the film it takes you right back to those times and those moments. It's very difficult to be objective about the work because you really have to remove yourself and see it a couple of times before you can really involve yourself in the story.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

The flashbacks are a great way to give answers to the story.

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

The fountain of youth is like the monkeys paw in the W. W. Jacobs story. It never ends well.

The framed tale is, in my opinion, one of the most natural ways to tell a story. If you think of it, the conceit of the frame-less story is actually the odd way of doing things. Without the frame, how do you know the context for a story?

The Freebie cost virtually nothing. We funded the movie ourselves, people got paid, but were mostly paid in the back end, we used one of the cheaper cameras we could get. The movies have a look to them, you can sorta point out the really low-budget movie. So even if the heart of the movie and the story are really, really great, they always sorta feel a little cheap.

The function of the Short Story is to be interesting, to convey vivid impressions, an therefore it must, to a degree, work with the evident and superficial thing

The fundamental story arc of the Bible is God is passionate about rescuing this world, restoring it, renewing it.

The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.

The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling. We're all part of the story; we can all contribute and participate.

The funny thing is, whenever I'm working on something, I kind of forget there's a lot of people watching. It makes it easier to be in the moment and to tell a story as well as possible.

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.

The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.

The genres change but all of my stories feature ordinary people thrown into frightening, life-altering situations.

The girls with prettiest smiles seem to tell saddest stories

The goal is always about the next story. It's always about the thing I haven't done before. It's about learning, or it's about becoming better, and it's about whatever story grabs hold of me.

The God-honest truth is that Jeff and I just do what we do. You have no control. We didn't have control last year, or the year before either, or the year before that. We can only do what we do, which is to make the show that we love, continue to follow the path for the stories that we want to tell, tell great and compelling stories, week-to-week, that interest our fans, and really hope for the best.

The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.

The gospel is not just the illustration (even the best illustration) of an idea. It is the story of actions by which the human situation is irreversibly changed.

The good stories, of course, write themselves. And somebody wants to know who are the really good writers, and how many of them there are. There aren't any. Most of the writers are likeable frauds. Some are unlikable frauds.

The graphic novel? I love comics and so, yes. I don't think we talked about that. We weren't influenced necessarily by graphic novels but we certainly, once the screenplay was done, we talked about the idea that you could continue, you could tell back story, you could do things in sort of a graphic novel world just because we kind of like that world.

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

The greatest directors are the greatest users. They use people's talents to tell the story that they want to tell.

The greatest untold story is the evolution of God.

The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.

The great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in.

The great success stories of chemotherapy were always in relatively obscure types of cancer. Childhood leukemia constitutes less than two percent of all cancers and many of chemotherapy's other successes were in diseases so rare that many clinicians had never even seen a single case

The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

The guys on the ground are the guys I care about. I've had the most satisfaction telling their stories. But when you're in combat with somebody, yes, a bond does grow.

The healing that can grow out of the simple act of telling our stories is often quite remarkable.

The happy story right now is the full page in Vanity Fair, which gives me a great deal of exposure.

The hardest thing for me to do, and the best thing I've done and learned as an actor is to sacrifice being funny in certain circumstances in order to do something that makes sense for the story or the character, or emotionally.

The head of a Pike, served at supper, is said to have caused the death from terror of Theodoric the Goth, who imagined the fish's features to be those of Symmachus, a man he had just killed. But for this story, we of today would have no idea what Symmachus looked like.

The hardest part for me during the creation stage is actually putting words on paper that make sense and tell my story the way I see it. I sometimes feel I am slogging through quicksand when I write.