Stories Quotes - Page 34

• From my vantage point in writing a story, I can't and don't and have no interest in thinking about the level of sophistication of the audience. I can only think about what interests me, and maybe what I would want to see if I were watching the movie. To me, that's the key to writing something that's not pandering.

  Charlie Kaufman

  Writing, Thinking, Keys

  "Michel Gondry & Charlie Kaufman" by Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. March 17, 2004.

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• How do we change the world? Change the story.

  Charles Eisenstein

  World, Changing The World

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• When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera.

  Kevin Spacey

  People, Watches, Three

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• There was a story that I was in a shoe shop and that I threw a pair of flip flops at the wall, shouting, 'I can't believe how overpriced these are!' I thought, 'Gosh, if I'm gonna take a big stand on something I would hope it would be for more than flip flops!'

  Rose McGowan

  Wall, Believe, Shoes

  FaceBook post by Rose McGowan from Apr 11, 2013

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• I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.

  Lesley Nicol

  People, Laughing, Favorites Things

  "InDepth InterView: Lesley Nicol On DOWNTON ABBEY Season Four, Playing Mrs. Patmore, MAMMA MIA!, DOWNTON Musical? & More". Interview with Pat Cerasaro, www.broadwayworld.com. December 23, 2013.

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• Unscrupulous agitators have been at work spreading atrocity stories which can only be compared with those lies that were fabricated by the same instigators at the beginning of the Great War.

  Adolf Hitler

  War, Lying, Atrocities

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• First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

  Bernard Malamud

  Book, Ideas, Firsts

  Bernard Malamud, Lawrence M. Lasher (1991). “Conversations with Bernard Malamud”, p.59, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Shades of Grey. I haven't read it yet, but what you have to read carefully, is “Story of O” by the French writer Dominique Aury. This is actually the forerunner of all the whole SM novels and it's really good. You have to read it.

  Theo Hutchcraft

  Sms, Shade, Grey

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• I think people just see cinematography as being about photography and innovative shots and beautiful lighting. We all want our movies to look great visually, to be beguiling and enticing, but I think that what really defines a great cinematographer is one who loves story.

  Seamus McGarvey

  Beautiful, Photography, Thinking

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• I really don't want to produce artwork that does not have meaning beyond simple decorative values. I want to use public space to create a public voice, and a public consciousness about the presence of people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way. By telling their stories we are giving voice to the voiceless and visualizing the whole of the American story.

  Judy Baca

  Simple, Voice, Space

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• No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.

  Cornelia Funke

  Thyme, Bishops, Growing

  Cornelia Funke (2011). “Inkheart”, p.116, Scholastic Inc.

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• There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I’m almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable. Every day we’re writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that’s made all the difference. Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.

  Drew Houston

  Adventure, Writing, Practice

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• Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.

  Donald Miller

  Epic, Unbearable, Conflict

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• Joe Biden once again denied stories that he will be replaced on the ticket in 2012. He says he will continue to embarrass President Obama for another four years.

  Jay Leno

  Years, President, Tickets

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• Stories happen to those who tell them.

  Thucydides

  Happens

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• Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Story Writers, Details

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• Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Paradise, Exploration, Relation

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• You can't really learn God's hope like you learn the logic of an argument or the details of a story. It's more like learning to belly laugh. You catch hope from someone who has it down in their gut.

  Shane Claiborne

  Laughing, Details, Logic

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• There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few...the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury...and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block.

  Stephen King

  Christian, Block, Views

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• Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?

  James Hillman

  Together, Plot, Needs

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• Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course. Blindsight is such a book.

  Karl Schroeder

  Book, Taken, Ideas

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• The immersive stories of This Is Paradise are a lithe blend of formal invention and traditional narrative pleasures. As such they reflect Kristiana Kahakauwila's intimate but expansive vision of a Hawai'i forged from the collisions of past and present, here and there. Her protagonists are as richly distinctive as the pidgin they speak, and yet each struggles profoundly with identity-that negotiation between ourselves and the world, which is at once Hawaiian, American, universally and compellingly human.

  Peter Ho Davies

  Struggle, Past, Vision

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• Arnold Schwarzenegger is in some trouble. Today, the Los Angeles Times broke a story that quoted six women who claimed that Arnold Schwarzenegger sexually harassed them. When asked about it, President Clinton said 'six? That's not enough experience to be governor.'

  Conan O'Brien

  President, Today, Six

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• It's been reported that some of Arnold Schwarzenegger's opponents have been circulating naked pictures of Arnold on the Internet. Yeah, in a related story, Arnold is leading the other candidates by four inches.

  Conan O'Brien

  Four, Opponents, Naked

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• For years, Mount Holyoke professor Joseph 'Full Metal Jacket' Ellis had been regaling students, interviewers and friends with gripping stories of his service in Vietnam.

  Ann Coulter

  Years, Vietnam, Students

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