"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

"No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. "
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death."
— Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony)

"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

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

"Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams..."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. "
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)

"silence is not a natural environment for stories, .....they need words without them they grow stale, sicken and die.And then they haunt you.
"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

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

"I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours"
— Jack Kerouac (Tristessa)

"Stories...are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words."
— Catherynne Valente (In the Night Garden)

"Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks."
— Walter Benjamin (Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)

"Pullman's sheer storytelling power [is] sinfully irresistible [...it is] a novel of electrifying power and splendour, deserving celebration, as violent as a fairy tale and as shocking as art must be.
-Dirdra 2000"
— Claire Squires (Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials)

"If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told."
— Carolyn Heilbrun

"...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us."
— Rabih Alameddine (The Hakawati)

""Now tell me the greatest story ever, with no regard for your own lives!"
Drosselmyer - Princess Tutu "
— Drosselmyer

" Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men.

Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake. "
— Bill Willingham

"You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't."
— Sandra Dallas

"Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do."
— Colum McCann (Zoli: A Novel)

"Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept."
— Enrique de Hériz (Lies)

"[I]t is the wine that leads me on,
the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing
at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the
man to dancing... it even
tempts him to blurt out stories
better never told."
— Homer (The Odyssey)

"Your tale, sir, would cure deafness."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

"Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all
places, in all times. "
— Rives Collins (The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling)

"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams . . . . "
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer)

"To hell with facts! We need stories!"
— Ken Kesey

"When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man."
— Frank Delaney (Ireland: A Novel)

"...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way."
— Ted Conover

"Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

"Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory."
— Baudrillard Jean

"I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I’d had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four,
but I find a truer account in the Herald-Star, where it says: “Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business… Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas”."
— Garrison Keillor (Lake Wobegon Days)