"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity."
— Gilda Radner

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
— Terry Pratchett

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
— Stephen King

"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)

"Story telling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Host)

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."
— John Berger (Keeping a Rendezvous)

"But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin."
— Mitch Albom (For One More Day)

"We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything."
— Charles de Lint

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."
— David Sedaris

"Hold it. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the three bears eat the three little pigs, and then the bears join up with the big bad wolf and eat Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood! Tell me a story like that, OK?"
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
— James Joyce

"Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie."
— Diane Setterfield

"What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?"
"Stories. And they give me hope."
— Neil Gaiman (Marvel 1602)

"A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell."
— Octavia E. Butler

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world"
— Philip Pullman

"By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"...the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe."
— Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)

"The Great Stories are the one that you heard and want to hear again. The ones that you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet though you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
All of them?
Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."
— Margaret Atwood

"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
— C.S. Lewis

"When a man's stories are remembered, then he is immortal."
— Daniel Wallace (Big Fish)

"But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."
— T.C. Boyle

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more."
— Gabriel García Márquez

""I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice." "
— Andre Dubus

"A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood."
— Marcus Sedgwick

"All stories are true. But some of them never happened."
— James A. Owen (The Search for the Red Dragon)

"Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger."
— Ben Okri

"Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
— Salinger, J. D.

"a story is ready when it falls from your face"
— Steve Aylett

"In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?"
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other."
— Kathleen Norris (Dakota: A Spiritual Geography)

"I will tell these stories...because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative."
— Michel Faber