A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
I confessed recently to an old friend, "I realized I was looking at you, in your visit, through old glasses. Speaking old words. Telling old stories. I realize that in my life I've made so many physical changes and I need to give my spirit time to catch up." Time for my spirit to look at my friend through the new glasses of current life experiences. Old friends are precious. They become even more treasured when they are wrapped in the currentness of life experiences and not relegated to the past in which they once lived.
I am, at the end of the day, a guy who loves story.
Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.
Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.
Along with its enchanting and exquisite melodies, West Side Story has attitude and a tremendous amount of frenetic energy. It's emotional, theatrical and technical. It's everything.
As far as I'm concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it's an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that's who you play to. It's not money - it's good to get some, but that's not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story.
That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.
When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.
They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I worked with men; in the Parkview, I could drink with men because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand wouldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.
Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.
When I was a little kid, before I learned how to write, I would tell stories.
My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.
In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.
Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
It goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.
The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
The story is always better than your ability to write it.
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