Stories Quotes - Page 25

• Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.

  Ilana Mercer

  Yarn, Acting, Hollywood

  "2 Movie Gems Amid A Lot Of Hollywood Hooey". www.wnd.com. July 06, 2007.

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• Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.

  Walter Benjamin

  Fall, Taken, People

  "Illuminations". Book by Walter Benjamin, 1950.

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• Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Art, Creativity, Simple

  Daniel J. Boorstin (2012). “The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination”, p.16, Vintage

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• You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.

  Errol Morris

  Thinking, Opposites, Ideas

  "The Eleven-Minute Psychiatrist". Interview with James Hughes, Stop Smiling Magazine, www.errolmorris.com. March 2006.

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• A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. ''Ours'' is different. My father's spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog's collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

  Aravind Adiga

  Dog, Father, Cutting

  FaceBook post by Aravind Adiga from Nov 30, 2013

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• Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - ''possessive'', even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

  Aravind Adiga

  Mother, Father, Fighting

  "The White Tiger". Book by Aravind Adiga, 2008.

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• History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Goes On, Lost, Retelling

  "Buzz Aldrin: What I've Learned" by Mike Sager, www.esquire.com. August 25, 2012.

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• Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.

  Seth Lloyd

  Running, People, Earth

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• It's a tremendous challenge, because there have been so many characters created over the years. Every time you think you come up with a great name, you find out somebody has already done it. Dreaming up the stories isn't that hard, but coming up with a good title is the toughest part.

  Stan Lee

  Dream, Character, Thinking

  "Q+A: Stan Lee Is Finally a Superhero". Interview with Adam K. Raymond, www.esquire.com. July 3, 2012.

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• Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me--I swear--"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved.

  Stan Lee

  Artist, America, Hands

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• Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Dr. Doom" ... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing ... I may tell him that he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I'll give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things.

  Stan Lee

  Home, Mean, Artist

  Stan Lee, Jeff McLaughlin (2007). “Stan Lee: conversations”, Univ Pr of Mississippi

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• Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.

  Stan Lee

  Writing, Boys, Thinking

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• X-Men is not a story about superheroes, but a story about the ongoing revolutionary struggle between good/new and bad/old. The X-Men are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there.

  Grant Morrison

  Teenager, Struggle, Past

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• My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate.

  China Mieville

  Beautiful, Hippie, Names

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• The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

  P. L. Travers

  Hero, Race, Blood

  "No Word for Time: The Way of the Algonquin People". Book by Evan T. Pritchard, 2001.

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• The one place where I can relax is on the golf course with my teammates and buddies, assuming I'm hitting the golf ball well. If I'm not, well, that is another story.

  Carson Palmer

  Golf, Relax, Balls

  Interview with Victor Kelly, www.ign.com. July 27, 2005.

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• When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.

  Samuel Laman Blanchard

  Relax, May, Gone

  "Sketches from Life" by Laman Blanchard. "That what Everybody Says must be True", 1846.

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• Coca-Cola remains emblematic of the best and worst of America and Western civilization. The history of Coca-Cola is the often funny story of a group of men obsessed with putting a trivial soft drink "within an arm's reach of desire." But at the same time, it is a microcosm of American history. Coca-Cola grew up with the country, shaping and shaped by the times. The drink not only helped to alter consumption patterns, but attitudes toward leisure, work, advertising, sex, family life, and patriotism.

  Mark Pendergrast

  Country, Sex, Attitude

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• The once rather old-fashioned science of paleontology finds itself in a maelstrom of excitement and controversy. Astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, geochemists, geophysicists, and statisticians are all contributing to the extinction problem. And the general public is taking part through television talk shows, magazine cover stories, newspaper editorials, and even the occasional mention in gossip columns.

  David M. Raup

  Gossip, Television, Maelstrom

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• Live Free or Die Hard may work better for an audience that doesn't know much about the series is than it will for Die Hard die hards, who will be wondering who that impersonator is and what he did with the real John McClane. The original Die Hard came out of nowhere to blitz the 1988 summer box office. The fourth installment arrives with a weight of expectations that Atlas would have trouble shouldering and, when the dust settles in September, it's unlikely that Live Free or Die Hard will be one of this year's big success stories.

  James Berardinelli

  Summer, Real, Dust

  "Live Free or Die Hard (United States, 2007)". Movie Review, www.reelviews.net.

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• I don't blame you for writing of me as you have. You had to believe other stories, but then I don't know if any one would believe anything good of me anyway.

  Billy the Kid

  Believe, Writing, Blame

  "Las Vegas Gazette", December, 1880.

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• There's a romance to danger. There's a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the story of our lives better.

  Joey Comeau

  Loneliness, Drinking, Romance

  Interview with Adrian Comeau, "I Am Other People" series, www.asofterworld.com.

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• I decided I don't want to go for the top job now. I could be working for another 25 years and I'd like to be reading bedtime stories to my children for another two or three years.

  Yvette Cooper

  Jobs, Children, Reading

  "Today" Programme, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk. May 2010.

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• Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy - it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite.

  Jane Espenson

  Meaningful, Real, Opposites

  "Caprica Producer Jane Espenson Redefines Racism in the BSG Universe". AMC interview, www.amc.com.

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• It seems far simpler to go ahead and say that the epic is a fantastic myth, that happens to be true of the material Universe, that other myths are true in terms of their cultural meaning, and that there's absolutely no problem with holding more than one story, just as there's no problem with viewing the sunset in terms of planetary rotation and spectra and nuclear fusions one moment and as visual splendor the next.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Sunset, Epic, Fusion

  "Board Forum: How Grand a Narrative?". 1999.

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