Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.
Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.
Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop
But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.
There are perennial stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Sherlock Holmes' and those sorts of things, which have been around since almost as long as film, and 'Frankenstein' is another one. They're perennial favorites, which get remade every 20 years, and that's OK.
A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.
As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.
Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.
The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.
The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.
Don't the great tales never end?" "No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.
It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
The memories stayed with him for so long, and stayed vivid. And it didn't matter to me that he'd already repeated that before. I could hear it forever.
All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.
It's good sometimes to have a character that starts as one thing and ends as another, but James Bond, Hercules, these are pretty enduring stories.
In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.
By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.
I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing. I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy, ... of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too.
We don't consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They're still magical characters, and the fact they've been around the block only adds to their magic.
The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.
I think there is something about a story that is enduring. Stories take on a life of their own.
Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called.
