"One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories." (Jean de La Bruyère, "Les Caractères" Aphorism 52, 1688)
"If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?" (Thomas Hardy, "Under the Greenwood Tree", 1872)
"All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion." (Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon", 1932)
"As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Nausea", 1938)
"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving." (John R R Tolkien, [Letter to his son Christopher] 1945)
"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts." Brian Aldiss, Penguin Science Fiction, 1961)
"Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat." (Orson Welles, "Chimes at Midnight", 1965)
"Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow", 1971)
"Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us." (Stephen King, "Salem's Lot", 1975)
"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all." (Isaac Asimov, "My Own View" [in "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"], 1978)
"No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old." (Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", 1990)
"Nothing comes from nothing, [...] no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new." (Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", 1990)
"People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around." (Terry Pratchett, "Witches Abroad", 1991)
"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time." (Umberto Eco, "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods", 1994)
"Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you." (Neil Gaiman, "Gods & Tulips", 1999)
"There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries." (Umberto Eco, "Baudolino", 2000)
"Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up." (Stephen King, "Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales", 2002)
"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river." (Mitch Albom,"The Five People You Meet in Heaven", 2003)
"Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments." (Joyce Carol Oates, "The Faith of a Writer", 2003)
"I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe." (Stephen King, "The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah", 2004)
"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on." (Ursula K Le Guin, "Gifts", 2004)
"Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story." (Neil Gaiman, "Anansi Boys", 2005)
"People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense." (Terry Pratchett, "Wintersmith", 2006)
"True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction - don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end." (Jeanette Winterson, "The Stone Gods", 2007)
"Arithmetic is the death of story." (Jincy Willett, "The Writing Class", 2008)
"Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school." (Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, [interview] 2010)
"Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself." (Erin Morgenstern, "The Night Circus", 2011)
"Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth." (Rumi)
"[...] out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time." (Francis Bacon)
"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)
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