"What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them."

"Skillful story technique can sell even the most outrageous premises and protagonists. Check out Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). They turned fringe into famous. You can, too."

"The Genre ('knock-knock,' 'a horse walks into a bar,' 'take my wife') sets us up for an expectation. When the payoff is inevitable, but surprising, 'orange you glad I didn't say banana,' 'Why the long face,' 'PLEASE'), we laugh."

"The truly enduring stories, the narratives we encourage our friends to pick up and which happily make money for their creators over decades, the stories that outlast their creators, are the ones that reveal some core human truth."

"We don’t make decisions based on our experiences.  We make them based on the stories of our experiences.  And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.  We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending."

"The only side you should fight on is the side of your audience. With weapons forged from the steel of Good Story."

"If you get inside the story and feel it, it doesn’t matter what age you are."

"Some might argue that novels shouldn't have to have a great ending, that we should just enjoy spending time with the characters.  Sorry ... We demand great endings of our movies and our plays, and we'll continue to do so of our novels."

"If there were a manifesto for 21st century fiction writers, I hope it would go like this: Down with high-flown literature! Cast off genre servitude! The revolution is founded in authorial liberty. It regards story and art as equals."

"Short fiction satisfies my writing itch because it's such a beautiful craft.  A good story doesn't try to do lots and lots of things.  It does one thing well.  Sometimes that is a most splendid thing."

"Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths." (artist)

"In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kinds of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has."

"We can use strategies derived from what we know about narrative to give our non-narrative essays more resonance."

"Story's important, so don't let it get buried with words."

"A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints."

"By Story’s end, the listener or reader or watcher has to be at the very least surprised and satisfied by the payoff of the Story’s initial promise."

"It's still very possible to make money writing pure spectacle—there will always be a brisk market for porn and explosions."

"We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day."

"Magic is such a raw, emotional experience, and it can be used as a storytelling device.  Sometimes people scream and run away—what a profound effect!  There is no other art form that can do that.  You cannot make somebody gasp, scream, and run away by looking at a painting or watching a dance routine."

"To preach that story is conflict, always to ask 'where's the conflict in your story?'—this needs some thinking about.  If you say that story is about conflict, you're limiting your view of the world severely.  And, in a sense, making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters.  This is simply untrue.  To see life as a battle is a narrow, Social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one.  Conflict, of course, is part of life, I'm not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it's not their only lifeblood.  Stories are about a lot of different things."

"The reporting of facts ... rarely contains the whole truth.  I say this because facts involve people and people are made up of contradictions.  The reporting of what happened rarely includes the more important question of what the story means to the people who stand at its center."

"Every story has at least a little truth in it. Every story comes from somewhere." 

"Your stories are your world; they're what help you do this thing that you love."

"Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you."

"The art of storytelling involves a willingness to surrender our idea of the way the story should be told, for the way it actually wants to be told."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves."

"We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we've made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we've done the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find our courage. We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we've been shaken in our boots in our own lives. This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we've made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change."

"Whether it's through an Instagram post or documentary film, the heart of the mission is constant: our job is to tell a story.  I'm eager to see what other avenues open up to tell those stories."

"Every story ever told really happened."

"The best way to learn whether your Story is reaching people is to tally the number of them willing to part with their hard-earned cash to experience your work."

"If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale."

"Hemingway said that stories are never finished, they're simply due."

"News stories are compelling mysteries.  Life is a compelling mystery.  The key of a compelling mystery is—as it is in journalism—to constantly advance the story.  No tangents, no digressions, no fancy tricked-up writing. Just a straight-ahead and irresistible tale."

"As you create your story, it takes on a reality of its own—and as you explore its workings, you metamorphose.  Your thinking changes, your perceptions shift, you become a different person: You become the kind of person who can tell this story from the inside.  If you succeed, then the way you describe events and places and characters will be as a resident would describe it, and it will feel to the reader as if you've been there yourself."

"It's always about execution. If I told you that I was going to write a story about a man who wakes up and finds he has turned into a beetle, there's a good chance you'd think it was a stupid idea. But Kafka has the power to make that not only a good story, but one that's actually shaped the way we think about short stories. ... Part of the answer is something about conviction, something about summoning the authority."

"[He] was not just a storyteller, he was a story. And story is resilient, protean, eternal."

"Here's a difficult concept to grasp and I'm sure I'll go to my grave trying to explain it. Just because a book becomes a bestseller doesn't make it something to emulate. There are a myriad of reasons why some books become bestsellers and still don't work as Stories."

"When I perform my day job as a kind of magician, I work with people's capacity to fool themselves with stories."

"I believe every story leaves some small impact on the reader.  Perhaps it's as small as a turn of phrase you unconsciously file away, a new word you hadn't heard before.  But something, some thread of it sneaks its way into your cranial blueprint and fiddles with the math a bit.  You may look the same, act the same, seem the same, but some microscopic part of your makeup is different."

"Real storytelling happens when writers forget the 'rule book' and write to the characters. They get inside the people in the story and experience the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and they let the reactions of the characters drive the incidents of the story."

"In learning how to tell a story, and learning how to develop my craft and skill as a storyteller, nothing could have been better practice than investigative journalism. ... From the standpoint of keeping the reader/viewer interested, and being riveting, suspenseful, educational, and entertaining, it's the same thing.  Choosing exactly the right word, choosing exactly the right sound bit or dialogue, making sure the setting is vibrant and that the conclusion is life-changing.  That's exactly the same."

"The little Brontës, with their kingdom of Gondaland, the infant Alcotts, young Robert Browning, and H.G. Wells all led an intensive dream-life which carried over into their maturity and took another form; and there are hundreds of authors who could tell the same stories of their youth." (artist)

"No one could say that [Stephen King's] work is short of storytelling, but he plots very little."

"It has never been more obvious to me that no one but the writer can understand what his story is or what it requires in the telling."

"We are seeking to create a story that amuses and entertains while capturing the complexity and truth of the human experience."

"A lot of people tell me their stories because they think they know mine, and in a way, it's very gratifying.  The more inward you become, the more universal you become."

"Stories affect us deeply."

"A good story is a good story. If what I'm writing reaches you, then it reaches you no matter what title is stuck on it."

"When you're two to ninety-two, you want to be told a story."

"A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.  Normally, everything you need to solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the magician wants you to.  When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged, you are left with a baffling mystery.  A good magician might make the trick mean more, by elevating it beyond the mere disappearance or transposition of some props.  If it can be made to feel somehow relevant to you, rather than mere display of skill, then the story is likely to have more import and the trick more impact."

"A Story either works or doesn't work. It either engages the reader or it doesn't. It's alive or it's dead, like our mongooses. And the last thing an editor wants to do is kill a living Story, no matter how mangy."

"Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that’s what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art." (artist)

"A good story is exactly what it is supposed to be and no more; it's economical, emotionally complex, has a good heart and operates on multiple levels, like a lover who's bad for you that you can't stop thinking about."

"A great story is a series of surprises.  Every chapter should have a surprise, every paragraph should have a surprise, every sentence should have a surprise."

"If you think of films often cited as 'perfect' movies,' whether it's old Hollywood films like Casablanca (1942) or more modern classics like Chinatown (1974)—it's not just the pictures you remember.  It's the characters' voices."

"Mamet and Macy's method to deconstruct the fundamental unit of a novelist, a playwright or a screenwriter's Storytelling is a Godsend. Read A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the meat of what came out of Mamet and Macy’s lectures and the foundation of The Atlantic Theater Company in New York. It's so simple, direct and easy to understand, it's mind blowing."

"We want to feel that life is important.  A good story reminds us of that."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"The sense of wonder is the marvelous heart of every great science fiction or fantasy story.  It comes from the surprise of discovery.  It comes from the recognition of the magic within.  Most of all, it comes from the realization—the acknowledgment—of something new in the universe."

"Commercial fiction can have literary qualities ... genre fiction can include good storytelling, and literary fiction can have a plot."

"Once you define a character, they tell their story."

"Figure out the hot spots in your story.  What are the moments or events after which your life was no longer the same?  If you write enough of these and put them in chronological order, this is your memoir."

"The dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel."

"Perhaps what we really crave is not to have more time or to have time off but to feel free of time. We want to experience what life would be like outside of time. Many people turn to drugs or alcohol just to have this experience. But we also experience this in dreams, stories, and our imagination. In these realms, we are free of time and space. (The opening phrase of fairy tales—'once upon a time'—doesn't mean 'a long time ago' but 'in a world beyond time.')"

"Something magical happened that night.  When I told that story, I felt an enormous listening coming from the audience, an enormous opening up.  I noticed that I could look into people's eyes more when I was speaking as myself as opposed to when I was speaking in character.  There was relating happening."

"Your goal, as a storyteller, is to evoke the sense of wonder in your audience.  You start by evoking the sense of wonder in yourself.  Where one person is awestruck, others are also likely to be amazed."

"By inquiring into what we feel strongly about, we are led directly to the seed of a powerful story."

Worlds of Wonder

"It's time to stop asking for permission. Storytellers have been cast in a submissive role for a long time."

"Technologies come and go. The story remains constant. More to the point, our need for stories remain constant. Storytellers and writers aren't going anywhere. They may need to bend with the wind. They may need to find new ways to thrive. But they—we—will always have a place. The audience will be there."

"Just because they have a wide audience that will buy whatever they write does not mean they wrote a Story that worked."

"Storytelling is how we—not just writers, everyone—practice our humanity, by trying to make sense of the world and our place in it."

Neil Gaiman - "Exploring Models of Online Storytelling"

"Short stories will teach you to write. It's that easy. Short fiction requires a heightened focus on sharp storytelling and crafty writing. A novel lets you get lazy. Short stories demand you to write in tip-top shape. You'll learn to say more with less."

"Stories are the most important thing we humans can create."

"What we feel strongly about is that thing we want to stand on our rooftop and shout to the world, that thing we would die for, that thing we are uniquely qualified to express.  What we feel strongly about is not the plot, but rather the underlying meaning that drives the plot.  What is that thing?  Be curious.  Because that is what your story is about. "

"When we make the story more important than the result, the story has a chance to live. "

"I fled, or at least, backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up. I did not want to be nailed to the truth; or to be more accurate, I wanted to be able to tell the truth without ever needing to worry about the facts."

"I'm trying to show the multiple variations of the entire life. I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they’re all a little different." (artist)

"It is our job to ruin the perfection of the empty page. It is our job to disrupt the status quo: because that's what storytelling is. Taking a straight line and bending it, breaking it, shaping it into something far stranger and far greater. "

"To explain things clearly, you connect the unknown to what your audience already knows.  Stories draw on common human knowledge and experience, and link those knowns to the unknown, or the old to the new."

Saving Mr. Banks

"More than anything, it's about telling your story through the viewpoint of characters who you'd spend four hours with over dinner, then spend four more hours with the next night.  If you can bring characters to life and invent a voice for them, so that they seem to be speaking in our own heads as we read, you will have a highly readable manuscript."

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

"You can't borrow awe.  You can't plot it into existence.  You can't provoke it through pretty words.  It has to come from you.  Your fiction will be awesome to the extent that you cut loose from convention, go to places that belong to you alone and embrace your godlike inner storyteller." (artist)

"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"The most humbling thing for me is when a reader thanks me beause my stories have actually helped them make sense of events or emotions in their own lives."

"Every single novel owes a debt to books that came before it."

"Don't try to tell every story at once.  Don't water down an experience by including too many threads."

"You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction."

"I'm on the lookout for a fictional person with a good story to tell me... After I make that connection, it feels more like a process of sitting back and listening."

"In order for stories to work—for kids and for adults—they should scare.  And you should triumph.  There's no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn't scary."

"The world will always need storytellers. That won't change. What will continue to change is how storytellers are discovered by readers."

 "A good story occurs when the author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability in search of truths that otherwise go untold." (artist)

"That's the purpose of stories, that's what they're for: They make life worth living and, sometimes, they keep us alive."

"At the end of the day, that's what keeps them reading: you giving the story (and by proxy, the reader) all you've got to give."

"I write stories.  I want to know what motivates people, so I create stories to venture answers.  My sister is a sculptor; she uses a different medium, but she's still looking for something."

"What felt magic can becomes either undone or overdone when you try to make a story out of it. Especially when you're a story-maker. Neil is. I am. We both are. I watch the story unfold. Sometimes I dictate the story to myself, then sometimes to the world. Sometimes I take dictation. Sometimes I get it wrong."

"People like big stories.  You get unmatched bang for the buck writing stories.  The bang in this case is being able to plant a big universe and a lot of powerful images inside a reader's head.  The buck in this case is that there's one person working alone without needing any special tools.  That's not going to change.  They may be delivered in different ways, on e-readers or whatever, but they will be around for a long time."

"The storyteller is a puppetmaster. You're here to pull strings and make people feel something—often intensely, often deeply."

"A story finds its own proper way of announcing itself."

"Do not be constrained by the formats that exist. Story does not begin and end with a physical book." (artist)

"We become the stories we listen to, read, and tell. That is the power of a story."

"At the end of the day, readers read because of how the story makes them feel.  And there is only one way to do that: through solid writing."

"Storytelling and writing are two different things."

"Stories come out of living, and looking, and reacting, and observing and thinking.  I can't explain what the source is. ... That's the experience of being alive and trying to render it coherent somehow."

"Why not go big? Fuck the rules. Hell with the genres. Experiment. Play around with storytelling. Do something different instead of traipsing the same paths."

"Gogol once said that the true, unwritten last line of every story is: 'And nothing was ever the same again.'  The same could also be said for the first line of any story: 'And from that moment on, everything was about to change.'"

"All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected."

"Every story is, in its tiny way, a horror story. Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether or not one is capable of overcoming those things... It's an existential thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every story this dark heart beats."

"Your story is an argument—a thesis positing a thematic notion, an idea, a conceit. The ending is where you (purposefully or inadvertently) prove or disprove that thesis."

"A good story should always be raising questions—not asking them directly, but instead forcing the reader to ask them."

"My best stories are the ones that don't feel entirely mine.  When I read them, I'm not sure how I wrote them."

"Each novel teaches me how to write it, and before I can truly understand what I'm writing, I need to imagine the one person to whom I'm whispering the story urgently."

"Authors have told excellent stories based on subjects they cannot know."

"Stories should change you - GOOD stories should change you."

"Writing is merely a conveyance for story—without story, without a message, writing is just a hollow bucket.  You need something to communicate, and story is that thing."

"A great storyteller is born.  You can learn structure quite easily, but great story and character come from people born with great imagination and the empathy to see many characters from different points of view."

"The truth comes out of many perspectives, not just one.  You get a different story when you ask four people to tell it than when you ask one person."

"Always be telling your story, even when it's not your story."

"Life is too short not to take risks and too long to live with an output of weak-kneed, limp-noodled, utterly derivative, safe-as-houses storytelling."

"I read somewhere that all biography is a lie, or at least that all biography is a single telling of a life when there can easily be a thousand different tellings."

"A story has many threads: character arcs, themes, ideas, plots, and so forth. A good ending ties up most of these. The best ending ties them all up."

"I think the better use of research is talking to people where they develop a trust and tell you their greatest story.  If you go in there and you know what you want to write and you just want to write it, then why bother them?  But you're there and taking their time because they have something amazing to share, and as a writer, all you're doing is trying to look through someone else's eyes."

"I think a story, when properly told, finds its own natural length.  If you try to extend it too much, it just stretches and begins to bore, and if you try to compress it too much, it just fractures.  So you just hope that you can find the right rhythm.  It's a musical thing.  You feel it out, you cut back, you switch things around—until it feels entirely natural.  A story should feel easy when of course it's far from easy." (artist)

"You have to be physically tough to follow the stories... you have to be tough to survive in your own world."

"The reason we tell stories, to judge from what I have seen among traditional people, is to keep each other from being afraid.  We tell stories and write poems, historically, to keep awe and aspiration and comprehension and the other components of hopeful lives bright in each other's hearts.  Storytelling is how we're moved to take care of each other when we recognize how extremely thin the veneer of civilization we cherish is, and how very hard it is to keep that veneer from shredding in the wind."

"Every great story, regardless of genre, will include a twist.  Why?  Readers want to be both satisfied and surprised.  The more they can decipher exactly where a story is going, the more disappointed they'll be.... Satisfying twists are revelatory in the sense that they add new meaning to all that precedes them."

"We all want to know what happens next.  That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story.  Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity."

"If your story fails to have even the tiniest glimmer of fun in it, I must politely eject. Even the darkest and most nihilistic tales need that little starburst of fun or humor—not only to break up the darkness but also to serve as contrast to the darkness. The darkness is meaningless if we don't have any light for comparison."

"If elements of my own life sift themselves into the plot, it's because they feel organic to the story I am telling—a story that distinctly belongs to the characters and not to me.  I try to listen to the demands of the story and stay true to them."

"You have to choose whatever will best serve the story—fact or fiction."

"When I did comic books for the first time, people told me, 'You're going to wreck your career.  You're a novelist, why are you lowering yourself?'  And I thought, What are you talking about?  There's no pyramid with literary fiction at the top and everything else at the bottom.  It's a flat line.  It's just a matter of how you want to tell your story.  And I just like being able to walk across that line." (artist)

"Sometimes it's as simple as that.  Tell a story.  Tell it simply and directly.  Tell us what happened."

"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."

"Storytellers create order with imagination."

"It's something you have to learn, how to tell the right stories for you, and it's this completely ineffable thing."

"Don't write because you think the genre is cool, write because you have a story to tell (and the genre will find you)."

"Art takes time.  Stories have their own heartbeat, and they will unfold at their own pace.  All you have to do is to continue to show up and do the work.  Every day."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"Surprising yourself is one of the true pleasures of storytelling."

"People say, 'I just want to see the facts.'  And I say, 'well, I'll send an email.'  If you're going to tell a story in visual terms, it should be exciting.  And I don't think anybody should have to apologize for that."

"It was the idea of going back and telling all these stories and all these things that I know and other people don't know. So why don't I tell them?"