Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.
George W. Bush bought the election - period. End of story. There is no argument. You can try to come up with any argument you can, but there is none.
Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.
I first studied to be a preacher, but decided that I was too prone to tell big stories. Then I studied Blackstone for a while and soon learned that I was not adept enough at prevarication to make a successful lawyer. I then made up my mind that I would seek some field where I could tell big stories and tell the truth.
Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.
Too many times, people are hearing the story from the second floor. Nobody's heard the story from the basement.
When you do a lot of interviews, you find yourself telling the same stories over and over. After you do it for a whole day, you say, 'Christ, I've said this five times today. ' It gets fun when you get so bored you start making it all up.
I don't feel like writing any more ghost stories.
Bedtime stories were definitely a big part of my life because I was just so excited my father was talking to me.
The telling of stories creates the real world.
In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful. ' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.
I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.
Empathy doesn't require that we have the exact same experiences as the person sharing their story with us. . . Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance.
Every real story is a never ending story.
I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
[All governments] get into a rut where every potentially good story turns into a bad one.
People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.
We cannot bear for our most mysterious experiences to remain unexplained. I've therefore learned. . . that every story has worth, since a person takes the time to tell it. The key is to listen.
My stories were translated and had many reviews before I had an interview with any international or Arab newspaper. If the stories hadn't succeeded, you wouldn't have asked me my position on Arab festivals and I wouldn't have been interested in the festivals anyway, because I would be in seclusion, writing.
