Story Meaning Quotes

People see in stories what they’re looking for, my young friend.

My stories have a deep spiritual core because I have a deep desire to understand things of the spirit, but yet I don't think I've written these stories from any kind of specific religious agenda because I don't think that would work.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.

One of the most fun things for me, as a writer, is when readers ask questions like, 'Oh, I noticed that you have a lot of water and baptism imagery in your book. Did you do that on purpose?'

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

I don't believe films should have a message, but 'Saleem' does.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

Me too." I agree fervently. "Every film should definitely have a message." Which is true. I mean... take the Lord of the Rings movies- they've got loads of messages. Like "Don't lose your ring.

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

The meaning of the story is the story.

Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won't be meaningful.

A story is ultimately a memory. It's important when you're telling a story to think about why this memory is a memory. You don't remember everything in life; you just remember certain things - so, why this one?

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

The themes and ideas embedded in 'Into the Woods' always spoke to me.

The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?

We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.

It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

Our subconscious works in metaphors, stories, and word play. That's why a particular story or movie may mean more to some people than to others. Have you considered why you quest for this tale now?

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.