We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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Willa Cather
This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I...
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Jandy Nelson
You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role,...
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Erin Morgenstern
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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Doris Lessing
[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool — it drives theman to dancing... it eventempts him to blurt out storiesbetter never told.
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Homer
More Quotes By Joan Didion
Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the...
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
