Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.

I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories...

We all tell stories - to ourselves and to each other. Some of learn to tell only the most interesting bits.

And I here make a rule - a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting - only the deeply personal and familiar.

Are infinite possibilities a storyteller's worst enemy or best friend? I'd say a bit of both really and one must be grateful for this paradox.

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no...

Screenwriting is made of brevity.

My Characters Tell ME Where THEY Want to Go.

In the words he's free, on the page he can be anything. A hero.

And then this happened. And then this other thing happened. Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you about the time this happened. I should've had this book over for a cup of coffee and a chat.

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of...

A lot of children's literature beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't...

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.

I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me, storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first,...

"Fiction is very, very important," he said, his voice rising. "Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction."

I guessed his name was Face of Horror. I wondered how long it had taken his mom to think of that. Bob? No. Sam? No. How about Face of Horror?

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you are getting to know better every day, something is bound to happen.

Uses a method for organizing that centers on three nested narratives: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. He teaches organizers entering into any setting to start not with policy...

Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.

Would you like to hear the night I bravely fought the

I can't say that exhaustive research and reporting will guarantee a great story, but I've never been able to pull one off without it.

Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.

and the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events...

The movie I was working on, "Cleopatra", it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.

Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.

He's telling Liesel's story to prove to himself that humans can be beautiful and selfless and worthwhile.

After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the 'real life' we want. Give us something better in books.