Stories Quotes - Page 18

• I've always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane.

  J. J. Abrams

  People, Insane, Relatable

  "Director J.J. Abrams feels lucky to land 'Force' job". Interview with Rick Bentley, www.fresnobee.com. December 16, 2015.

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• I love stories where the impossible appears believable, plausible and real. Maybe it's silly, but it's one of the reasons Michael Crichton's writing always appealed to me: he took outlandish ideas and made them seem completely within the realm of possibility. I remember reading "Jurassic Park" and feeling like: "Oh, yeah - no, that's totally happening right now. They're bringing back dinosaurs!"

  J. J. Abrams

  Real, Silly, Reading

  "J. J. Abrams: By the Book". The New York Times Interview, www.nytimes.com. October 24, 2013.

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• Keep your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today—all the shifts in the business, all the drama, all the debating about where publishing is going—and write the best story that you can. It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that is the single key to success.

  Jeff Abbott

  Drama, Writing, Thinking

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• Speaking of things that'll make your head explode, "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" finally made it to the drive-in

  Joe Bob Briggs

  Dragons, Made, Made It

  "Dragon (1993) review" by Joe Bob Briggs, www.joebobbriggs.com. July 18, 2010.

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• I am working here (in Amsterdam) on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!

  Max Beckmann

  Giving, Lasts, Exhilaration

  Stephan Lackner, Max Beckmann (1983). “Max Beckmann”, Crown Pub

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• If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Land, Numbers, Dinosaurs

  "The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs". Book by Robert T. Bakker (p. 16), 1986.

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• In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Smart, Book, School

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• [Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato.... He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, " Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.

  Plato

  Mother, Plato, Alive

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• Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.

  Douglas Adams

  Book, Cereal, Ideas

  "Douglas Adams" by Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. January 28, 1998.

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• All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.

  John Muir

  Heart, Volcanoes, Earthquakes

  John Muir, Peter Browning (1988). “John Muir, in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations”, p.66, Great West Books

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• Marriage is like a book. The whole story takes place between the covers.

  Mae West

  Marriage, Book, Whole

  "Fictional character: Marlo Manners". "Sextette", www.imdb.com. 1978.

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• No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate--like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history--until it degenerates into fables.

  Isaac Asimov

  Dust, History, Lapses

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• Alcibiades had a very handsome dog, that cost him seven thousand drachmas; and he cut off his tail, "that," said he, "the Athenians may have this story to tell of me, and may concern themselves no further with me.

  Plutarch

  Dog, Cutting, Tails

  Plutarch (1871). “Plutarch's Morals”, p.211

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• My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. I had some sort of gift and when it came time to try to find a publisher I had a little bit of an "in" because I had his agent I could turn to, to at least read my initial offerings when I was about 20. But the only problem was that they were just awful, they were just terrible stories and my agent, who ended up being my agent, was very, very sweet about it, but it took about four years until I actually had something worth trying to sell.

  Anne Lamott

  Sweet, Father, Reading

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• We're all just big kids. That's all we are. We are artistes. We grew up wanting to be part of the fantasy of the fairy tales and the stories.

  Angelina Jolie

  Kids, Fairy Tale, Fantasy

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• In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world--God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.

  Fulton Oursler

  Bible, Book, Writing

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• A yokel mind loves stories from of old, Being the kind it can repeat and hold.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Mind Love, Kind, Love Story

  Geoffrey Chaucer (1966). “The Canterbury Tales”

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• Nothing embitters my old age [like] the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances, that I shun the white men and seek the Indians, and that now even when old, I seek to retire beyond the second Alleganies.

  Daniel Boone

  Men, White Man, Civilization

  "The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer". Book by John Mack Faragher, p. 302, 1993.

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• Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.

  Clint Eastwood

  Couple, Giving, Car

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• The only book I ever read cover to cover was The Pete Rose Story. I read half of The Lou Gehrig Story and then made a book report on it for four straight years.

  Pete Rose

  Book, Years, Rose

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• I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Reading, Thinking, America

  "Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 56), 1989.

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• What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Past, Race

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• Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Christian, Art, Stars

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• I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religious, Atheist, Thinking

  Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.55, Basic Books

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• If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka .

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, Trying, Covering

  Simon Cottee, Thomas Cushman, Christopher Hitchens (2008). “Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left”, p.5319, NYU Press

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