Top 500 Quotes About Stories (2025 Update)
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51. “If you own this story you get to write the ending.”

— Brené Brown

52. “Everything starts with a story.”

— Joseph Campbell

53. “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

54. “Everybody has a story. And there’s something to be learned from every experience.”

— Oprah Winfrey

55. “We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.”

— Jerome S. Bruner

56. “Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

57. “Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”

— Elif Shafak

58. “Without conflict there is no plot, without hope there is no story.”

— Cassandra Clare

59. “Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.”

— Suzanne Collins

60. “To survive, you must tell stories.”

— Umberto Eco

61. “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

— John Steinbeck

62. “Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness.”

— Mark Twain

63. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

64. “Why ruin a good story with the truth?”

— Woody Allen

65. “A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

66. “Not everything in this life has a happy ending, but this life is not the end of the story.”

— Rick Warren

67. “Every love story is a ghost story.”

— David Foster Wallace

68. “Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.”

— Eduardo Galeano

69. “If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

70. “This moment will just be another story someday.”

— Stephen Chbosky

71. “If you tell a true story, you can’t be wrong.”

— Jack Kerouac

72. “The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth – the very thing the whole story has been about.”

— C. S. Lewis

73. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

— Joan Didion

74. “Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.”

— Richard Branson

75. “The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”

— Alain de Botton

76. “Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”

— Stephen King

77. “Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?”

— Nicholas Sparks

78. “But that is another story and shall be told another time.”

— Michael Ende

79. “If a story is in you, it has to come out.”

— William Faulkner

80. “Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.”

— George R.R. Martin

81. “History is a story written by the finger of God.”

— C. S. Lewis

82. “Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.”

— Philip Pullman

83. “The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

84. “Share your story with someone. You never know how one sentence of your life story could inspire someone to rewrite their own.”

— Demi Lovato

85. “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

— Joss Whedon

86. “All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they’re any good, the ending is a beginning.”

— James Clavell

87. “Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

88. “Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”

— Ernest Hemingway

89. “You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.”

— Garrison Keillor

90. “Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.”

— Miguel Ruiz

91. “Happy endings are just stories that haven’t finished yet.”

— Angelina Jolie

92. “Every man is a hero of his own story.”

— Brandon Sanderson

93. “The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else’s story.”

— Miguel Ruiz

94. “Whoever tells the best story wins.”

— John Quincy Adams

95. “The story of your life is not your life; it’s your story.”

— John Barth

96. “Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.”

— Hans Christian Andersen

97. “I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

98. “If you write a hundred short stories and they’re all bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

99. “Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything – we need only listen.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

100. “We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

— John Steinbeck