Top 500 Quotes About Stories (2025 Update)
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151. “Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

— Octavia Butler

152. “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”

— Walter Benjamin

153. “Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who wanna tell you a story but don’t wanna make eye contact while telling it.”

— John Green

154. “Life is not a private affair. A story and its lessons are only made useful if shared.”

— Dan Millman

155. “God is using your present circumstances to make you more useful for later roles in His unfolding story.”

— Louie Giglio

156. “The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.”

— Terry Pratchett

157. “In life, every ending is just the start of another story.”

— Julian Barnes

158. “The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’”

— Pat Conroy

159. “When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

160. “Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

— Eugene H. Peterson

161. “Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.”

— Randy Pausch

162. “If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

163. “And in stories, endings matter.”

— Atul Gawande

164. “If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

165. “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.”

— C. S. Lewis

166. “The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.”

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

167. “If there’s any single talent a writer needs, it’s persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.”

— Octavia Butler

168. “Story is the language of the heart.”

— John Eldredge

169. “Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

— Salman Rushdie

170. “If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

171. “One story sounds good until another is told.”

— Aesop

172. “Every story I’ve written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

— Ray Bradbury

173. “A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”

— Raymond Chandler

174. “A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.”

— Eudora Welty

175. “Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”

— Philip Pullman

176. “Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

— Stephen King

177. “The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.”

— Pete Seeger

178. “Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.”

— Donald Miller

179. “If you look at any ancient civilization, they’ve all used fantasy stories to train the young.”

— David Gemmell

180. “I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for – so that at day’s end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

181. “Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”

— Natalie Goldberg

182. “Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

183. “People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.”

— Neil Gaiman

184. “Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you’re playing a tender love story that’s set in a coffee shop or whether you’re in ‘The Avengers,’ which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.”

— Tom Hiddleston

185. “I don’t think you can write – at least not well – if you don’t love stories, love the written word.”

— Nora Roberts

186. “Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now, by facing what is rather than making up stories about it.”

— Eckhart Tolle

187. “You don’t have to live anybody else’s story.”

— Stephen Curry

188. “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.”

— Chinua Achebe

189. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

— Joan Didion

190. “If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”

— Terry Pratchett

191. “To be a person is to have a story to tell.”

— Isak Dinesen

192. “Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.”

— Jeanette Winterson

193. “My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident.”

— Hans Christian Andersen

194. “Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”

— Laurie Anderson

195. “People don’t care how you feel. You need to paint pictures, you need to tell stories. That’s what people want. They want to be entertained. Then all of the other stuff kind of filters across as part of the whole thing.”

— Glenn Frey

196. “We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

197. “Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

198. “The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.”

— Toni Morrison

199. “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”

— Frederick Buechner

200. “If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.”

— Joseph Campbell