The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it’s not the most dramatic story about the West. – David Roberts
While ‘Precious’ isn’t a real person, it’s someone’s story, and it’s too many peoples’ story. – Gabourey Sidibe
I’ve tried, in ‘Bloodmoney,’ to tell a story that gets at the crazy relationship between the ISI and the CIA, these absolutely fascinating, often mutually destructive two scorpions in a bottle kind of relationship that they have. – David Ignatius
I didn’t know ‘Homeland’ was going to be ‘Homeland.’ I just did it because it was a terrific script, and they pitched me the story line, and I was like, ‘Huh, that’s interesting.’ – Damian Lewis
When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes. – Dave Eggers
I am not worried that the Egyptians will suddenly invade Ethiopia. Nobody who has tried that has lived to tell the story. – Meles Zenawi
If you ask around, it’s pretty easy to find someone who has a bank account overdraft horror story to tell. – Carolyn Maloney
We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. – Daniel Kahneman
Adventure books are my personal favorites. ‘The Endurance,’ a story about Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctica expedition, or ‘Into Thin Air,’ Jon Krakauer’s personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables. – Dean Karnazes
I would try to write my own story about some East Coast suburbanite having an affair or something like that. So I did that for maybe two years or so, and it just wasn’t working for me at all. – Donald Ray Pollock
We have to be really sensitive to making sure were not creating any stories that don’t feel like they’re ready to be told… We have to make sure we’re getting the right story and the right content from the talent we work with. – Diane Nelson
I don’t write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story. – Desmond Dekker
There’s no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it. – Chuck Todd
It’s not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story. – Greg Kinnear
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. – Daniel Kahneman
If I had quietly retired as governor in 2007 and went into banking or something of that nature, I would have been, at most, a footnote in the story and probably never mentioned. – Mike Huckabee
‘The Hobbit’ didn’t include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really. – Evangeline Lilly
I actually like older horror movies more than newer ones because when I’m watching newer ones, like ‘Chucky’ or ‘Saw’ or whatever, I’m like, ‘Come on, really, this isn’t even good, all it is is blood and knives.’ I like when it has a story line, you know? When it’s actually a movie. – Emily Alyn Lind
If your attention is on superfluous aspects that are not part of the story, then you can’t be concentrating on the human realities of the piece. – Miguel Ferrer
The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I’d come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon. – Margaret Haddix
I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I’m trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in ‘Bellocq’s Ophelia’ my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it’s not linear, but it’s round in that way, and much of ‘Native Guard’ is like that. – Natasha Trethewey
Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you ‘flesh out and clothe’ your structure that makes each story unique. – Caroline Lawrence
Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it’s always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude. – Martin McDonagh
The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting. – Malik Bendjelloul
