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.

What it has to do is move--end up in a different place from where it started. That's what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?

A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.