All Quotes By Tag: Story
“Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life’s life-story.”
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“Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness… proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.”
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“In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.”
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“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”
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“The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.”
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“The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either.”
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“Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What’s less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I’ve changed the cat little because I didn’t know what my characters were going to say next.”
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“I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.”
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“In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.”
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“The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him”
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“I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.”
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“Common man’s patience will bring him more happiness than common man’s power.”
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“Music is the fastest motivator in the world.”
“Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.”
“In a democracy government is the God.”