Story Matters Quotes & Sayings

The client wants an innocent young girl and you will fulfill that role. He doesn't want to hear your life story or why you entered this line of business. You are forbidden to discuss weighty matters or your personal life. Do you understand? — H.M. Ward

Homer then has the bard - a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people" - say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine — Adam Nicolson

That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story ... The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie. — Roberto Bolano

Age never matters when there is a will to learn more will to learn better.!!

Always remember, every success story begins with a START.!!

Anyone can desire but there are few who DESERVE.!!

Anyone can desire, be the one who DESERVE.!! — Harsh Malik

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans. — Rian Johnson

I hope that by sharing my story, I inspire others to stand for what they believe in and know that their voice matters, even if change doesn't occur overnight. — Dominique Moceanu

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy. — Colum McCann

Stories are factual ... If a man and his story are in conflict it is the man who must change ... In America it is the man who matters not the story. — Adam Johnson

We all spin stories. That's what we do. We want people to see certain things about us and not others. What matters is whether you let others in to the truest story, the one that's the hardest to tell. — Maya Lang

Thank God, 50 years ago I learned that a great song, our entire business is all based on two things; a great song and a great story. Film, television, if you don't have that story, nothing else matters. You don't call anybody else or direct anybody. The same with a song. A great song can make the worst singer in the world a star. — Quincy Jones

Mind your mind! Check your heart! In the end, you shall realize that it was not just your heart and your mind which directed how you lived your life, but things that lived in your heart and in your mind were the true ink that wrote the story of your life in the best or worst manner! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

But Zelda was never about plot. Indeed, one's head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don't dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook - kidnap the princess - and this time it'll work! He's utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management. — Jeff Ryan

I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me. — Nicola Griffith

And for the city's birthday, we will host events in every neighborhood of the city, inviting all of our residents to share in the celebration of Boston's great epic - the story of neighbors who support one another where it matters most. — Thomas Menino

Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters. — Aurin Squire

You must make time for that which matters, for that which defines you: your passion, your progress, your pen. Take it up, and write your own story. — V.E Schwab

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. — Neil Gaiman

- What's there to talk about? I love you, you love me. Nothing else matters, love is the most important thing. The rest will come by itself.
- No, Elida. You're mistaken. Everything is important while sharing a life together. Love, honesty, habits, affinities. Everything. One is fulfilling the other and one can't exist without the other. — Natalie Ansard

the reason Israel's story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world. — N. T. Wright

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can't clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself. — Tim O'Brien

Don't ever allow yourself to feel trapped by your choices. Take a look at yourself. You are a unique person created for a specific purpose. Your gifts matter. Your story matters. Your dreams matter. You matter. — Michael Oher

We have created a mindset in our society where everyone wants what they want when they want it. And if we don't get what we want when we want it, we feel ripped off. To make matters worse, we intensify our problems by continuously rehashing our woe-is-me story to the entire world. Whatever it is that has the potential to keep you from enjoying the day, understand that it's not the situation itself that is causing you to be unhappy. It's your thoughts and how you allow them to control you. It's what you choose to focus on that fuels your emotions and defines your reality. — Steve Rizzo

Nobody's story is real unless we share it with someone who matters. — Jeffrey Deitz

IF YOU WANT A STORYBOOK ENDING, stop - now - and remember them in that tender moment. Be content to know that they embarked on a series of adventures throughout the West and that they stayed together through thick and thin for forty-five years.
But know this as well: If their story ended here, no one would remember them at all.
Where a tale begins and where it ends matters. Who tells the story, and why . . . That makes all the difference. — Mary Doria Russell

Love is the story and the prayer that matters the most. — Brian Doyle

Collins, echoing Ed Catmull, "What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it. What matters is how you play the hand you're dealt." He continues, "You don't leave the game, until it's not your choice. Steve Jobs had great luck at arriving at the birth of an industry. Then he had bad luck in getting booted out. But Steve played whatever hand he was dealt to the best of his ability. Sometimes you create the hand, by giving yourself challenges that will make you stronger, where you don't even know what's next. That's the beauty of the story. Steve's almost like the Tom Hanks character in Castaway - just keep breathing because you don't know what the tide will bring in tomorrow. — Brent Schlender

I'm an author with a penchant for research. For me the part where I'm learning new facts comes before the story I weave
to make an entertaining read. — Marcia Fine

But before we get up close to the trees, we should step back and make sure we are gazing upon the same forest. As is so often the case with controversial matters, we will never agree on the smaller subplots if it turns out we aren't even telling the same story. The Bible says something about homosexuality. I hope everyone can agree on at least that much. And I hope everyone can agree that the Bible is manifestly not a book about homosexuality. — Kevin DeYoung

It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk. — Miranda July

I know who I am, and I know who you are, and nothing else matters. it's how we live our life. — Tal McThenia

my life matters - even if it's only to me - and my story isn't over yet. — Carian Cole

I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That's how I would conquer it, conquer death."
She sighed again, and nestled in closer to me. "All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight. — April Genevieve Tucholke

Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just like this - so I don't want fancy descriptions getting in the way. — Ronald Frame

The drawing and the crafting of the story are fun, but it's the overall meaning that matters to me. It might escape some people who just want to read a comic, and that's fine. The overall meaning is what matters. — Brian Michael Bendis

And if that's the case
if we are our remembering selves
then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings. — Jennifer Senior

Sometimes all a story needed was one or two people to read or listen to it to make it matter. — Adam Langer

Later that night I realize that Ky did not give me any more of his story and I did not ask. Perhaps it is because now I live in his story. Now I am a part of his, and he of mine, and the part we write together sometimes feels like the only part that matters. — Ally Condie

If you're directing, it doesn't really matter any more if it's going straight to TV - what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you. — Cary Fukunaga

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters. — Natalie Goldberg

There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting. — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Oftentimes
when I read a book,
I want to savor
each word,
each phrase,
each page,
loving the prose
so much,
I don't want it
to end.

Other times
the story pulls me in,
and I can hardly
read fast enough,
the details flying by,
some of them lost
because all that matters
is making sure
the character
is all right
when it's over. — Lisa Schroeder

If an audience finds themselves paying attention to how you made your film, you're sunk because that means they're unplugged from your story. What matters is what's unfolding on the screen, not how you put it there. It doesn't matter if it's red triangles or million dollar software if the audience doesn't care. — Don Hertzfeldt

Don't be afraid to write and share your story with the reading world! Find your courage! It is a fact that some will love it and some will hate it, but there will always be at least one reader who needed it and that's all that matters! — S.L. Morgan

I believe that when we love someone, we respect them, and we listen to them; we feel that their voice matters. And- we let them dictate the terms of who they are and what their story is. — Laverne Cox

I know I'm only 21 and what do I know about life and love and what really matters? But my promise to myself while writing this book was to tell my story, no one else's. To write the story of my life so that I can remember it in the way I want to remember it. To write this down in an attempt to make it better, to make my story come alive. — Charlotte Eriksson

To be a leader, you do not need a crown or robes of office. All you need to do is to write your chapter in the story, do deeds that heal some of the pain of this world, and act so that others become a little better for having known you. Live so that, through you, our ancient covenant with God is renewed in the only way that matters: in life. Moses' last testament to us at the very end of his days, when his mind might so easily have turned to death, was: choose life. — Jonathan Sacks

The interaction between the two matters, but to me, each doesn't really exist independently of the other, so I'm not ever faced with a situation where the tone is wrong for the story, or the story wrong for the tone. They are two parts of one thing. — Rachel Kushner

I had to tell it because it was the only honorable way to fulfill the promise that I had made on the Red Lake Reservation almost twenty years earlier. This, then - The Wolf at Twilight - is the fruit of that promise. It is the part of Dan's life I had left untold. It takes us to places that for too long have been hidden in shadow and reveals truths about what has been taken from Native people and what the rest of us have lost in that taking. But it also reveals what we may all yet become if we heed Sitting Bull's poignant entreaty and put our minds together to see what kind of lives we can create for the children. I hope you find it worthy of your time. If it opens your eyes to another way of understanding, I am grateful. If it simply entertains you, I am pleased. But what matters most is that it touches you. For it is, above all, a story of Native America, and its goal is to lodge deep in your heart. — Kent Nerburn

If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique. — Dorothea Brande

The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue - records that tell a consistent story. — Neal Stephenson

Where we are from, he said, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change ... But in America, people's stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters. — Adam Johnson

Everything is 'just a story'. Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, what ever it's just a story. What matters is making sure it's heard. — Mira Grant

Rhythm, repetition, making patterns
these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn't lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decade. It is the humming that matters. — Breyten Breytenbach

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer ... Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. — Tim O'Brien

Got it. Look, the way I see it, two people walk in the restaurant, a Methodist and an atheist. The Methodist says, I'm not going to tip because I just came from church and I've already done my good deed for the day. The atheist says, I'm not tipping because life is meaningless and we're all just animals. To me, they're both members of the same religion, because they're doing the same thing. Whatever little story they tell themselves to justify it is irrelevant. It goes the other way, too - if a Muslim and a Scientologist come in and both leave a tip, they're on the same team. It doesn't matter to me if one did it because of Allah and the other was obeying the ghost of Tom Cruise, what matters is it resulted in doing the right thing. — David Wong

And what about the question which looms up continually within Christian discussion, about how human behavior as a whole relates to the overwhelming grace of God? This is the point at which the story of the rich young man, and the other scenes in Mark 10, seem to be saying, No: what matters isn't simply keeping a bunch of rules; what matters is character. Not just any old sort of character, either, but a particular sort: the sort Jesus was urging and modeling - the character of patience, humility, and above all generous, self-giving love. And the message of Mark at this point seems to be that you don't get that character just by trying. You get it by following Jesus. — N. T. Wright

Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically. — Madeleine L'Engle

Every good love story has a start and a finish. What matters is what happens in the middle. — Suzette R. Hinton

Rhys straightened. "You'd- make me food?"
"Heat," I said. "I can't cook."
It didn't seem to make a difference. But whatever it was, the act of offering him food... I dumped some cold soup into a pan and lit the burner. "I don't know the rules," I said, my back to him. "So you need to explain them to me."
He lingered in the center of the cabin, watching my every move. He said hoarsely, "It's an... important moment when a female offers her mate food. It goes back to whatever beats we were a long, long time ago. But it still matters. The first time matters. Some mated pairs will make an occasion of it- throwing a party just so the female can formally offer mate food... That's usually done amongst the wealthy. But it means that the female... accepts the bond."
I stared into the soup. "Tell me the story- tell me everything."
He understood my offer: tell me while I cooked, and I'd decide at the end whether or not to offer him that food. — Sarah J. Maas

What matters most, is not how my end happens, or if it happens now. What I care about in this instant, is that she knows how much I love her - that I lived long enough to have her love me back. — Emm Cole

What matters in the story of our human relationships is not whether they lead to happily ever after but who and what they make of us. All relationships are our teachers, and this is especially so in a time of societal unraveling. — Carolyn Baker

The story's what matters; spelling's overrated. — Adam Langer

You are the only thing I've ever needed. The only treasure that matters.
- Seamus Tierney — Libby Bishop

For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a house, become an expert, make a cup of tea ... Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self - beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.
You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are. — Eckhart Tolle

I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time. — Joe Hill

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything. Having a place the story starts and a place it's going, that's important. Telling your story as honestly as you can and leaving out the things you don't need, that's vital. — Neil Gaiman

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business. — Peter S. Beagle

As for 'too much description,' well, opinions differ. We write the books we want to read. And I want to read books that are richly textured and full of sensory detail, books that make me feel as if I am experiencing a story, not just reading it. Plot is only one aspect of telling a tale, and not the most important one. It is the journey that matters, not how fast you arrrive at the destination.
That's my view, anyway. Others writers differ, of course. There are hundreds of books where everything is subordinate to advancing the plot, some of them quite fine, but my work has never been about that, and never will be. — George R R Martin

We're all human, we should be respectful of others, and tolerant with each other. This matters more than whether we eat the same food or speak the same language. The skin colour does not make us different. It's easier to be with people that are different to you but have the same values than to be with people who appear similar to you but have different values." Sophie — Angela Nicoara

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize. — Colm Toibin

Morris liked to share he books with others. Sometimes it was a favorite that everyone loved, and other times he found a lonely little volume whose tale was seldom told.
"Everyone's story matters," said Morris. And all the books agreed. — William Joyce

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. — Daniel Kahneman

What's really important is storytelling. None of it matters if it doesn't support the story. I thought The Avengers was an appalling film. They'd shoot from some odd angle and I'd think, why is the camera there? Oh, I see, because they spent half a million on the set and they have to show it off. It took me completely out of the movie. I was driven bonkers by that illogical form of storytelling. — Wally Pfister

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters. — Robert Harris

It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed. — Laura McBride

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. — Terry Pratchett

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. — Roger Zelazny

Whether your characters journey daily to a distant moon or just down the street to the corner bar, what matters to the reader is the singular event that distinguishes one such voyage from all the others and makes for a story worth telling. — Peter Selgin

A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, "My story matters because I matter." A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn't. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we've convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster. Revolution — Brene Brown

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes ... — Joy Williams

It's the shape of the stories that matters, the way belief forms around it. The story has real weight', He pointed at himself. 'Patupaiarehe look like monsters in some stories, but they're beautiful in a lot. I guess people believed more in the beautiful version. And the ideal of beauty changes. If I'd been born two hundred years ago, I bet I wouldn't look like this. The stories shaped me. They shape everyone, inside and out, but me more than most, because I'm magic. — Karen Healey

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. — Haruki Murakami

I want you to read 'God Sees the Truth, but Waits,' " said Mother. "Tolstoy writes about a man, wrongly accused of a murder, who spends the rest of his life in a prison camp. Twenty-six years later, as a convict in Siberia, he meets the true murderer and has an opportunity to free himself, but chooses not to. His longing for home leaves him and he dies." I ask Mother why this story matters to her. "Each of us must face our own Siberia," she says. "We must come to peace within our own isolation. No one can rescue us. My cancer is my Siberia." Suddenly, two white birds about the size of finches, dart in front of us and land on the snow. — Terry Tempest Williams

At one level the story of the second fall of Zimbabwe can be read as tragic yet a courageous one: a simple but soaring binary about unfounded courage in the face of immeasurable oppression. But at another level, it is a window into a much more complex, perhaps even darker and sadder, narrative about contemporary slaveship and the terrible collision of aspiration and frustration and the need to survive that has been unleashed upon the people of Zimbabwe. Exploitation and oppression are not matters of race. — Thabo Katlholo

Years ago I read an interview with Paula Fox in which she said that in writing, truth is just as important as story. Reading that interview was the first time I really understood that there's no point in trying to impress people with my cleverness when I can just try to write honestly about what matters most to me. — Molly Antopol

Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters wonderful — Eric S. Rabkin

But in spacious, vigorous story-telling, in the use of an historical framework, in the relating of human events to a larger philosophical and spiritual context, in the deployment of fiction as a social and political weapon, in the exultation of 'the people' as a supreme authority, in the treatment of suffering as a dominant theme--in all these matters Hugo exerted a profound influence on Tolstoy. — Peter Washington

Your story matters, who you are matters, tonight matters, none of it is an accident. You were born for the blue skies. — Jon Foreman

The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate. — Stacey D'Erasmo

I am fortunate enough to have worked on, and continue to work on, evolutionary movies in all formats from just simple good story telling, which still matters most of all, to CG movies to tent-pole size 3D movies, and genre 3D movies like 'Piranha 3D.' — Mark Canton

If you have to become a filmmaker, find a story that takes you away, and tell that story. Don't think about whether it's going to sell, or whether it's going to make money, or whether it's going to appeal to distributors. Do something from the heart that really matters, and then you'll do something good. — Anne Makepeace

The requirements for illustrating an eight-page story are as different from that of an ensemble-cast mini-series as they are different from a solo ongoing. Whether or not they're named Captain America or Ruby Thursday matters less to me than whether or not their characterization is consistent and actions logical ... storytelling concerns. — Stuart Immonen

It is the story that matters not just the ending. — Paul Lockhart

Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is - sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes. — John Gardner

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting. — Jo Nesbo

It doesn't matter where the story comes from, it matters where it takes you. — J.R. Meehl

I finally figured out that it doesn't matter what other people want to read. It matters what you want to write. You write the story that you would want to read, and then fans will come. If you love what you write, others will too. — Jami Montgomery

Further, in the modern story, reality is that which is observable, measurable, and repeatable - the kinds of phenomena available, accessible, and verifiable to the five senses. Thus, reality comes to equal the scientific method. It should come as no surprise that in such a world the life of the spirit is ignored or marginalized (as well as a great many other nonmaterial things.) This view of life subsequently birthed in human beings a ravenous materialism as matters of the soul were ignored or reinterpreted within this tightly controlled version of reality. When the life of the spirit is ignored, people will seek to feed the hunger of a neglected soul with the only nourishment available: in our context, the consumptive acquisition of material goods. — Tim Keel

For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn't matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I've ever met, revealed truths I've somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It's filled me with awe, which is to say it's made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art. — Donald Maass

No, not death. We have chosen life eternal, the resurrection of the ... '
'That is a story to tell children. The truth is that for thousands of years we looked to what was living. Now you look to what is dead, you worship a dead man and tell one another that this world is not for us, while the next is all that matters. Only there is no next world. — Gore Vidal