Stories Quotes

"Lost in Translation" by Sofia Coppola. It's a masterpiece. I laughed a lot but was also overwhelmed by the story - a rare combination.

I really think the Bible is a baseline where all stories come from. All of the zillion stories in the Bible provide inspiration for everything.

Someone once told me that the most dynamic actors are people who have stories. People who have lived life. People with experiences.

I already love acting and I love actors, so being able to communicate with actors and to bring performances out of them, and to tell a story and aid them, is really exciting for me.

A lot of why we become actors is to fill a void that we have and a part of that void is to live out and tell stories that we've lived or that we hope would have been different in our own lives.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

When you do 22 episodes of a network show, it's incredibly useful to have a format that gives you a jumping-off point for a story.

I like to tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.

I think any good singer needs to be a good actor. You have to be able to tell the story.

Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust. This is the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.

I think that's a hallmark of a really good story that it has readers that it speaks to more than others.

And then he tells her stories. Myths he learned from his instructor. Fantasies he created himself, inspired by bits and pieces of others read in archaic books with crackling spines.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

I was always looking for holes in the stories, to the very end, until I was really satisfied that I believed in it and could back it up five different ways.

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.

There are many dramas that I would like to make: dramas based on real stories. It's approaching things from the other side.

I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.

When you direct a film, everything should be about the story and nothing else.

Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.

For me taking a pragmatic decision when it comes to art is almost an oxymoron. The reason I first picked up a pen and wrote a story had nothing pragmatic in it.

The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.

Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.

It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.

I think that, in Hebrew, it's like the language creates a more unique and specific universe even before the story.

I think tone gives birth to the story.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams [less than two pounds]. I have a very heroic birth story.

In my stories I can kiss the girls I want to kiss and punch the girls I want to punch. Nobody pays a price for it.

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

'Brooklyn's Finest,' this is the kind of movie that's why I want to be an actor, to tell real-life stories. This is where I feel my job is, to interpret life.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

I'm always trying to look for how I can find human stories that aren't just dramas.

When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories.

Country music has the great stories.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

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

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.