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"I am more one for the story, I think, than the action."
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Exlpore more Storytelling quotes

"What so tedious as a twice-told tale?"

"Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!"

"If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me."

"Far more often [than asking the question 'Is it true?'] they [children] have asked me: 'Was he good? Was he wicked?' That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie."

"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."

"The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

"That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."

"This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk."

"A story has value whether it's true or not."

"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving."
Explore more quotes by Sara Sheridan


"Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love."


"For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it."


"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."


"I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show."


"I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it."


"Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it."


"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."


"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."
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