Story Influence Quotes

Yes, there is a way I was taught to think that's very suited to writing. And, of course, I'm thankful to have grown up in a world filled with stories.

Do goofy stories make people nice? What if, in their goofiness, these stories somehow inspire that in the right way. Is that a social good?

When I was three and a half years old, I heard my big sister tell my mum that at school that day all the kids sat on the floor and watched 'The Neverending Story.' Having never heard of the movie, I concluded that this was what school must be: sitting cross legged on the floor listening to a never-ending story. Page after page.

I do like to keep abreast of what the hardcore vocal members of the comics-reading audience are talking about on Internet message boards, but there are so few of them, as a percentage of the buying audience, that I can't allow their opinions to dictate story direction.

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

It's so easy, as a writer, to get stuck in your own head, to live in the little worlds you create. To forget that there are people out there reading your work, people who may be deeply affected by what you do, that you are writing not just for yourself, but for them.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

I was 21, when I heard the story that inspired this [thriller Allied], and I wasn't even a screenwriter then.

'Joker' was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children's book, and that eventually became 'Noel.' And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.'

I think 'Beasts of No Nation' is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.

Typically, members of Congress don't just hear a story about a program and indicate whether they support it or not.

Actually, after three years, I realised that the opening scenes of 'Polladhavan' were inspired by 'Lolita,' in which the lead character says, 'Why did I meet her? My life would have been different had I not met her.'

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.

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

I understood that the stories we believe have power over us. They work into our bodies and minds and change us from inside out. What if one day these stories become something stronger, more real, than fairy tales?

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners.

I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

No matter what you write, you actually can't help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake.

Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.