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"I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it."
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"What so tedious as a twice-told tale?"
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Personal Development
"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!"
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk."
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Personal Development
"As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper."
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Personal Development
"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be."
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Personal Development
"What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not."
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Personal Development
"Experience is the catalyst for all great stories."
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"Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting."
Life
"Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."
Success
"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose."
Writing
"As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight."
Humor
"It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought."
History
"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun."
Sports
"One of the first lessons life teaches us is that on these occasions of back-chat between the delicately-natured, a man should retire into the offing, curl up in a ball, and imitate the prudent tactics of the opossum, which, when danger is in the air, pretends to be dead, frequently going to the length of hanging out crAape and instructing its friends to gather round and say what a pity it all is."
Strategy
"Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them."
Memory
"It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them."
Humor
"It is the bungled crime that brings remorse."
Justice
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