Top 500 Quotes About Stories (2024 Update)
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201. “If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.”

— Joseph Campbell

202. “There is no story that is not true.”

— Chinua Achebe

203. “You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

204. “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”

— Ben Okri

205. “Do not dump your woes upon people – keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them.”

— Elbert Hubbard

206. “The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.”

— Julio Cortázar

207. “The truth of the story lies in the details.”

— Paul Auster

208. “Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

209. “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

— Arundhati Roy

210. “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”

— Dorothy Allison

211. “A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters.”

— Julio Cortázar

212. “After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.”

— Ernest Hemingway

213. “I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

214. “Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new combinations that make them new.”

— Salman Rushdie

215. “While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”

— Jeffrey Archer

216. “By coming forward and sharing your story, you don’t know the countless lives you change.”

— Mariska Hargitay

217. “A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

218. “All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”

— Isak Dinesen

219. “The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

220. “When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth.”

— Rumi

221. “I like stories with lots of psychology.”

— Alfred Hitchcock

222. “Tarot is just stories on cards.”

— Erin Morgenstern

223. “No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It’s never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?”

— Cormac McCarthy

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

— Raymond Chandler

225. “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.”

— George Saunders

226. “I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.”

— Yann Martel

227. “If I want a long boring story with no point to it, I have my life.”

— Jerry Seinfeld

228. “A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

229. “The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.”

— Zadie Smith

230. “A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.”

— Isabel Allende

231. “Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.”

— Criss Jami

232. “I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Philip Pullman

234. “I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.”

— Leo Tolstoy

235. “The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.”

— Donald Miller

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

— Pete Seeger

237. “When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.”

— Jeanette Winterson

238. “Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.”

— John Ruskin

239. “Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.”

— Ben Okri

240. “Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Donald Miller

242. “The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.”

— Stephen King

243. “I really believe it’s the moments we can’t talk about that become the rest of our lives. It’s the moments we can’t process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

244. “Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told.”

— Henry David Thoreau

245. “The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands – all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

246. “A child’s own story is a dream, but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.”

— Margaret Wise Brown

247. “And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.”

— Erin Morgenstern

248. “Great stories move through fear.”

— Donald Miller

249. “Politics always change. Stories never do.”

— Stephen King

250. “All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability.”

— Michael Scott