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21 " Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments. "
― Dorothy Allison
22 " I’m very interested in the emotional honesty of things, which at times looks kind of ugly and at times looks scary and not polished, and so there were many times when I would audition for something and I would come from, for me, a very honest place, but it’s completely not what they’re looking for for that type of material. But I was always very steadfast in what I was interested in, and I felt like, I’m gonna tell the truth as best as I know it. And you eventually start to understand that the projects find you that meet up with that. It takes as long as it takes, and for me it took like 20 years, but I’m really glad. You know, the jobs always ultimately end up going to the person who’s supposed to tell that story, and those weren’t my stories to tell. "
― Brie Larson
23 " We walk until there aren't more houses, all the way to the part of the beach where the current makes the waves come in then rush back out so that the two waves clash, water casting up like a geyser. We watch that for a while and then Scottie says, " I wish Mom was here." I'm thinking the exact same thought. That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too. Every day I kept track of anecdotes, occurrences, and gossip, bullet-pointing the news in my head and even rehearsing my stories before telling them to Joanie in bed at night. "
24 " All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. "
25 " While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them. "
― Eric Arrouze , A Gourmand in Training (Child to Chef, #1)
26 " I'm turning into an old man. I own four pairs of oxfords, my stories get a little long winded, and my neighbors play their music too loud. "
27 " And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give. "
― Mary Oliver , Dog Songs
28 " Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. "
― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
29 " The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page. "
― Eudora Welty , On Writing
30 " I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place. "
31 " I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams. "
32 " Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived. "
33 " Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy. "
34 " I was thinking about it: so many of my stories are about my family life, not about being related to a lot of famous people. That's my grandma, that's my mama, my daddy, my aunt, my uncle, my stepdaddy. I'd probably tell them even if they weren't well known. "
35 " My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day. "
36 " Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go. "
37 " People have responded to my stories so well. They come up after a show and say things like, 'Your album really helped me,' or 'I have stage four cancer. I'm terminally ill.' Somebody told me it gave them the courage to die. "
38 " A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies. "
