Making Up Stories Quotes & Sayings

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder. — Donald E. Westlake

I think they find it - they find me quite confusing, because - they know the music, but they don't know anything about me ... because I keep a very private lifestyle so they end up ... making up stories as such. But I don't really concern myself too much about them. — Enya

What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he - or better yet, *she* - watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look.
-Leah said - to Nadine, although she was looking at Marjorie (pg 138) — Dean Hughes

When I tell my family I want to be a writer, they smile and say, We see you in the backyard with your writing. They say, We hear you making up all those stories. And, We used to write poems. And, It's a good hobby, we see how quiet it keeps you. They say, But maybe you should be a teacher, a lawyer, do hair . . . I'll think about it, I say. And maybe all of us know this is just another one of my stories. — Jacqueline Woodson

The laws of economics tell us that atoms are expensive if they're rare, and the laws of physics tell us that they're rare if they require unusually high temperatures to make. Putting this together tells us that if atoms could talk, the priciest ones would tell the best stories. Garden-variety atoms such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen (which together with hydrogen make up 96% of your body weight) are so cheap because garden-variety stars such as our Sun can produce them in their death throes, after which they can form new solar systems in a cosmic recycling event. Gold, on the other hand, is produced when a star dies in a supernova explosion so violent and rare that it, during a fraction of a second, releases about as much energy as all the other stars in our observable Universe combined. No wonder making gold eluded the alchemists. — Max Tegmark

These are just stories, you know. They are part of what we are, but they are not the real thing. All this year I've been thinking, What would White Raven do? And today, every time I thought it, I just didn't care what White Raven would do. So today I've just done what I would do. I've just done what I think is right. I'm not going to stop making up stories. But I'm thinking now that they aren't just for pretending to be someone else, someone more exciting, someone braver than you really are. They are not always jut a maze to get lost in so you can run away from life. They can just as well be maps to help you navigate. — Elizabeth Wein

He had no intention of actually kissing her. Knowing Jenny, she probably put on arsenic tainted lipstick every morning. But she'd been the one making up reprobate stories about him for weeks and throwing herself at him all evening. — Anne Garboczi Evans

There is no use complaining about the hidden brain, or wishing it away. The telescope effect in our moral judgment is part of our nature. There is nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about our actions. We can choose to allow our actions to be guided by reason rather than instinct, choose to set up national and international institutions that respond instantly to humanitarian crises, rather than wait for our heartstrings to be pulled by stories of individual tragedy. If we rely on our moral telescopes, there will be people in a hundred years who ask how the world could have sat on its hands through so many genocides in the twenty-first century. Making — Shankar Vedantam

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. — Sylvia Plath

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author. — Victoria Hanley

I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades. — Meg Cabot

Wait-you mean the Mall, as in a bunch of museums in DC that we would wander around and I'd pretend like I understood modern art while really thinking, holy crap, a gremlin could have painted that and for all we know did, or the mall, as in picking out a new pair of shoes, eating food that's terrible for us, and making up life stories for all the people that pass us?"
'I can see now that I must have meant the second.'
"What a smart boy. — Kiersten White

We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up. — Malcolm Gladwell

There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day ... The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end. — Anthony Minghella

Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way. — Jay-Z

My life is making movies. I like storytelling, and I've got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up. — George Lucas

Every story was being made up. My true friends weren't the ones speaking. It was people who never knew me, making up stories. Even my local paper put a $1,000 bounty out for information about my whereabouts. — Marla Maples

That's how religions and histories make their way into the world, not through battles and conquests, but through poems and kennings and songs, passed through generations and written down by scholars and scribes ...
After all, words are what remain when all the deeds have been done. Words can shatter faith, start a war, change the course of history. A story can make your heart beat faster, topple walls, scale mountains
Hey, a story can even raise the dead. And that's why the King of Stories ended up being King of the gods, because writing history and making history are only the breadth of a page apart. — Joanne Harris

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell. — Michael Ondaatje

My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous. — Paula Hawkins

He started that game of making up stories about strangers. He wrote stories for a living, and he always said the stories seemed like a way to hide ourselves while revealing others, but really we were only revealing ourselves. And so, we would look back on the stories we made up and figure out what they meant about us. — Ron Bass

Given that I don't know anything, when I am making up stories about the future, why not make it a good story instead of a scary one? — Sharon Weil

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up. — Nick Earls

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act ... about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat. — Theresa May

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers. They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner sat dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop? — Barry Hannah

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism. — Tom Wolfe

God is a thing I think I see in glimmers all over: an enormous and vague warmth I sometimes catch pulsing around me, giving me shivers and making tears prick my eyes; a mysterious and limitless Thing threaded through all the world and refusing to be reduced to a name or a set of rules and instead winding itself through millions of stories, true and made up, connecting all breathing things. And — Emily Henry

TOP TEN RESOLUTION PITFALLS 1. Being vague about what you want 2. Not making a serious commitment 3. Procrastinating and excuse making - no time, wrong time, dog ate my homework 4. Being unwilling to go through the awkward phase 5. Not setting up a tracking and reminder system 6. Expecting perfection, falling into guilt, shame, regret 7. Trying to go it alone 8. Telling yourself self-limiting rut stories 9. Not having backup plans 10. Turning slip-ups to give-ups — M.J. Ryan

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them. — Neil Gaiman

It's a great wake-up call for our entire industry: What movies are we making? What storytellers are we allowing to tell the stories? What people are we allowing to be cast in those stories? I think we need newer stories, and more people given the opportunity to do anything they want. — John Krasinski

The sky was so blue I couldn't look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories,
but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk
tick tick tick
me not making a sound
and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind,
but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine. — Charlotte Eriksson

I love making up stories. I love getting lost in other worlds and being with other characters. I love the way I think I'm in control and then the characters and stories take on a life of their own.
I love how I can incorporate my own faith into the stories I write.
Writing is both discovery and creating and with each book I do that. Discover and create. It can be an adventure some days, a nightmare others. I also like that I can do this wearing ugly clothes. — Carolyne Aarsen

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told. — Jennifer McMahon

Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them. — Scott Westerfeld

so thanks for supplying all the inspiration." "But think of everything you came up with all on your own," she said. "You would have done just fine without me. I wish I had your imagination. What's your secret to making a story so good? Do you have any writing tricks or rituals?" Conner had never thought about it before. He thought back to the very first time he wrote a story and recalled a tool that had helped him write ever since. "Whenever I write, I imagine everything in Dad's voice," he said. "I try to describe everything with the same energy and enthusiasm he had when he read stories to us. Sometimes when I miss him the most, writing makes me feel like he's there with me. — Chris Colfer

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...

You really need to learn to take a compliment. — Laura Bates

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling. — Dorothy Allison

I never, ever have seen media this way. It's almost indescribable. Making up stories, refusing to run real stories. It's making themselves look like utter fools. There's no journalism, there is no media. There's pure, full-fledged advocacy here. — Rush Limbaugh

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. — Catherynne M Valente

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do. — Dido Armstrong

Garth on making his stories feel real "Things like armour, clothes and other small details are very important in building up the reality of the story... I do spend quite a lot of time on things like clothing, armour, weapons and try and make them feel real. — Garth Nix

I've always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along. — Ann Leckie

I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it. — Kerry Greenwood

The biggest mistake I made was not having a full-time producer. I was securing locations and wardrobe and making sure people get called to show up on time and getting the film to the lab and getting the camera, and all this stuff that I'm happy to do, but if I'm doing every little thing, I'm not concentrating on my story. So it never gets any better than the script. — Shane Carruth

Maybe, Hazel decided, maybe they could both learn how. Not just making-up-stories-in-which-you're-happy happiness, but the real thing. She leaned across the bed and hugged him with all the strength in her limbs, hugged him until her bones ached. But no matter how hard she hugged him, she knew it would never be enough.
"I promise," she whispered. "I'll try. — Holly Black

Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn't think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me. And yet it was the main reason I'd gone in those houses with Tom: I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus. — Donna Tartt

I don't know if it was just me making things up in my head but after the fear in their eyes had gone what replaced it was like a sad kind of wondering. A wondering of where the old me was hiding. A wondering about where the old me had gone to. It was like I had suddenly been taken over by someone else and they could see the old me had fallen away for good. — Kerem Mermutlu

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up. — Casey Stoner

This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed. — John Irving

Because Wade had thrown everything away - drawings, clothes, toys - each accidental remnant loomed in Ann's mind with unspeakable importance. Four moldy dolls buried in the sawdust of a rotten stump. A high-heeled Barbie shoe that fell from the drainpipe. A neon toothbrush in a doghouse. Then, finally, the half-finished drawing in a book. Artifacts heavy with importance they didn't deserve, but which they took on because of their frightening scarcity; they built up against her, making stories of themselves, memories inside her head that should have remained in Wade's. — Emily Ruskovich

It's important to understand it's OK to control the subject. If most editorial stories were photographed just as they are, editors would end up throwing most in the waste basket. You have to work hard at making an editorial picture. You need to re-stage things, rearrange things so that they work for the story, with truth and without lying. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

Instead of making up stories, stay with the facts. For example, "I am ruined" is a story. It limits you and prevents you from taking effective action. "I have 50 cents left in my bank account" is a fact. — Eckhart Tolle

You can start making up any kind of story if you want to. — Maurice Sendak

You're going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we're riding in a forest, or landing on an island - '
'No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics - — Virginia Woolf

I always wanted my kids to like me and think I was funny, so I made up this story about a kid named Jake and his racecar that he had built from scratch, fully loaded with whatever fantastical gadget he or I wanted him to have at the moment. I loved making up the stories off the top of my head. — Rhea Perlman

I think I was born making up stories in my head. I wrote my first play when I was 5. No, I couldn't write yet. It was with a stick on a piece of paper that floated by on the wind, and it was about a girl named Cindy. The fact that it closely resembled Cinderella is pure coincidence. — Darynda Jones

I was always inventing characters and making up stories. — Suzanne Vega

Lester Levenson used to say, 'Release and allow yourself to see the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be.' During this process, welcome your thoughts, your sensations, your feelings, and the stories that you tell yourself. Just allow them all to be here, and know that everything is okay as it is. Part of what happens when we release this is that we start to recognize the perfection underlying our thoughts and feelings. Begin by making yourself comfortable and focusing your attention inwardly. Now, bring to mind ... an issue that's currently up in your awareness. As you think about that situation, problem, intention, or goal, allow yourself to get in touch with your feelings about it right in this very moment.
— Hale Dwoskin

Travelling the dusty highways in the early evenings, just as the light began to fade, I would look out along the perpendicular dirt tracks that joined the road at intervals. They undulated away gently into the distance; slow streams of people in twos and threes and fours walked them, through the haze, talking easily, making their way back from wherever lay beyond. I longed to take every one of these turnings, to step out along every track in the morning, to return at dusk, to see what lay over each of these horizons and to share in the stories of those that returned from them. My trajectory, and that of each one of us, was that of a meteor, shedding millions of tiny sparks of possibility with every passing second, each with the capacity to ignite a flash of experience, but nearly all of which quickly burned up and vanished as it was left behind. The fire that moved forward was the flame of our lives. — Luke F.D. Marsden

We still like to make up stories, just as our ancestors did, which use personification to explain the great forces of our existence. Such stories, which explain how the world began or where the sun goes when it sets, we call myths. Mythology is a natural product of the symbolizing mind; poets, when not making up myths of their own, are still commanding ancient ones. — John Frederick Nims

You know, a lot of people would think that these stories that you're making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. — Betty Smith

When I'm making a movie, it's making use of my creative juices, and it fills me up with what really is - I think my purpose here is to tell stories. — Gerard Butler

I like the way dreams present themselves as words and images that are trying to get your attention using your model-making brain's ability to make up stories. — Amy Hardie

I have an idea about building almost like a studio for some of the best Tropfest filmmakers, so they can come together and support and be given space and resources they need to tell great stories year around, so it's not just about the festivals. You know, the sky's the limit with this thing, and I'm still making it up as I go along. — John Polson

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies," Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray.
"You weren't saying that last night," Jaxton retaliated, coming up to Ben's side, to give him a nudge. They were both smiling, while looking down at the counter, where Ben was making his delicious rosemary cookies. "In fact, I seem to remember you grabbing my sticky fingers and putting them in your mouth," he teased, speaking quietly, so that Lyon wouldn't hear them at the other side of the room.
Ben turned to Jaxton and abandoned his baking, to catch his face in flour covered hands and plant a deep kiss on his lips.
Jaxton opened his mouth, in acceptance of his kiss.

~ From the Heart — Elaine White

I was the kind of kid who was always making up stories and adventures. — Alexandra Adornetto

I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever. — Elizabeth Wein

I wish I thought you were joking and making that up. Unfortunately, I know better. Gods you are your son's father. What did I do to deserve two of you?" Shaking her head she met Hermione's gaze. "Is it easier with human sons or males?"
"Not really. I never know what horrifies me more-the stories Ryn tells me, or the ones he withholds out of respect for my maternal sensibilities, or fear of what I'll do to him should I ever learn the true nature of his innate recklessness and brazen stupidity."
"For the record, its definitely the latter. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Francie always remembered what the kind teacher told her. 'You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you're making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up.'
It was the best advice Francie ever got. Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind
as they are in the mind of every lonely child
that she didn't know which was which. — Betty Smith

There are things you haven't thought of in centuries."
I waited for the joke, then realized he was serious. Apparently our break up had turned him into a raving lunatic. I should probably be flattered. "Really Alex, you don't have to act like an immature kid. It's fine if you want to see me again, but next time, just say so instead of making up asinine stories. — Angela Corbett

I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die sharing my stories and laughing with you and until then, I'll run around this world ... Confessing my stories and making everyone else, confess their's to me. — Jose N. Harris

One of the fun things about play is making up stories ... — John Lasseter

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. — George Orwell

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nine-teenth century parents were suitable for children, and gothic ghost stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I read handbooks on decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in languages I didn't understand where I could make up stories in my head on the basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books. — Diane Setterfield

I was an athlete growing up and I miss that. I miss hanging out with dudes and making raunchy jokes and telling stories, trading details, you know? There's something I really miss about that. — Chris Pratt

Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate super-person who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. — Alan W. Watts

When you do a lot of interviews, you find yourself telling the same stories over and over. After you do it for a whole day, you say, 'Christ, I've said this five times today.' It gets fun when you get so bored you start making it all up. — Christian Bale

What makes it worth it though, is I love drawing. I LOVE IT. I love making comics. I love starting a new page and buying new paper, ink and brushes. I love telling stories! I love the people I work with, I love the people I meet. I love thinking about the syntax and language of comics. I love esoteric discussions about the comic book industry. I love the opportunities I've had in life because of comics. The second I stop loving it I will find something else to do.
Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don't offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium. Comics will pick you up after it knocks you down. Comics will dust you off and tell you it loves you. And you will look into it's eyes and know it's true, that you love comics back. — Becky Cloonan

It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine. — Bruce Springsteen

People started saying I was ignoring my country, making up stories about me. Ludicrous things, like that I throw tea on my assistants. — Joss Stone

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent. — Stephen Graham Jones

I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down. — Susanna Clarke

Every character I've had in my act - none of them have a similar creation story. I actually thought up Peanut and designed him in my head. I described him to a woman that was making soft puppets and she drew up some sketches. And the character came to be just because he popped into my head. — Jeff Dunham

It is a privilege to be recognized by FDLA. I am a staunch believer that as a member of the Bar, we have the great privilege to represent clients in all facets of our practice, and that includes making the commitment to represent clients for whom access to representation and ultimately justice is limited by economics. As all of the 20 for 20 honorees have done, stepping up to meet that commitment is at the heart of what it means to be a lawyer. I hope the inspiring stories and contributions of my fellow honorees will shine a bright light on FDLA and this most important mission. — Terrence J

Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for. — Erri De Luca

As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon. — Aimee Bender

The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives. — Brene Brown

So," Jesper said, adding sugar to his coffee. "Other than Inej making a new pal, what the hell happened out there?"
"Let's see," said Nina. "Inej fell twenty stories."
"We put a serious hole in my father's dining room ceiling," Wylan offered.
"Nina can raise the dead," said Inej.
Matthias' cup clattered against his saucer. It looked ridiculous in his huge hand. "I can't raise them. I mean, they get up, but it's not like they come back to life. I don't think. I'm not totally sure. — Leigh Bardugo

What's gratifying for me and interesting is that people are picking up on exactly what I want them to, which is that this is energizing people, and making them want to make stories. — Jessica Abel

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue, and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised. — Emily Mortimer

Carol's liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. — Sinclair Lewis

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end. — Philip Pullman

My best friend and I went to sleep-away camp every summer. We'd share stories of making out with boys, but we never did, so we made it all up. My real first kiss was at a friend's house when I was in junior high. He was such a good kisser, and we're still close friends! — Kourtney Kardashian

I had been interested in the local legends and tall tales regarding the site, and the director had been kind enough to introduce me to several residents who'd grown up in the area and who knew the stories of this mythical "gateway to hell," now a state park, presumably because the devil had departed, making way for field-trippers and hikers. — Rick Yancey

My siblings were a bit younger than me, and I was always entertaining them and making up stories. — Patti Smith

And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one. — Mark Ravenhill

I've always thought that, as a romance writer, I had the best job in the world. I sit around all day making up emotion-drenched, conflict-laden stories that push my heroes and heroines to the edge of sanity. Then I give them a happy ending. — Ruth Glick

Anchor Your Stories in Redemptive Themes So We Are Moved to Live Up to Them: Rather than making yourself the victim or the hero in the stories you tell, describe a daunting time of loss, crisis, or criticism or where you made a mistake or acted badly, yet you were eventually able to learn from it. Such stories show vulnerability and a desire to grow and live fully rather than in fear. Then that facet of you can be the place where others can positively and productively connect with you, hard-earned strengths firmly attached together. You can support each other in reinforcing redemptive characterizations and action. — Kare Anderson

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life. — Graham Swift

When I play games, I'll make up little stories for just anything. It's almost the game of making up background stories for people you see on the street. You know what I mean? I wasn't exactly the popular kid in school growing up, so I found myself really observing people, and watching how they interact, and how they react to things. — Kim Swift