individual stories Quotes

Everybody has a story. And there's something to be learned from every experience.

One of the many lessons I hope I've learned is how much I underestimated people, their open-mindedness and their willingness to understand. I think, moreover, I underestimated the degree to which everyone has a story. So my advice, for whatever it's worth, is to trust readers, trust the truth and trust the power of storytelling.

There are far too many people for us to think about each of them during our short stay on earth—like the thousands of books in a library we haven’t time to read in an afternoon. But this is no excuse to cease browsing. For every now and then, we find that one book that reaches us deep inside and introduces us to ourselves. And, in someone else’s story, we come to understand our own.

I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

But, at the end of the day, we want to have a show where we can focus on these individuals and their relationships with each other. That's really what the show is about.

I think it's really important to understand that every trans story is not the same, and we are as varied as any other group of people.

Life is very fleeting. It’s important to be gentle and optimistic. We look behind and think what we’ve done in this life has been good. It was simple; it was modest. Everyone creates their own story and moves on. That’s it. I don’t feel particularly important. What we create is not important. We’re very insignificant.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's.

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

Then a person has only one tale?” No, some have two or three separate ones or more,” Fleet said. “Some people have many tales. Sometimes they are linked into one big tale, sometimes they are utterly distinct. Most people do not have one at all.

I think that that is a wonderful format - you know, having individual stories over a period of weeks that are thematically connected in terms of genre - there's not enough of that out there.

Like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character's perspective. Maybe that's a good idea for a TV series.

A book reaches a different crowd of people. There are 50 different stories of very different individuals participating in their communities either locally or nationally in meaningful ways.

I don't pick my presidents because they were great presidents. I'm not much interested in ranking presidents and who is the best and who is the worst. I am much more inclined to be interested in them if they had an interesting life and if they were a complete person - and by that I mean they also had flaws and failings.

That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.