Gretchen Rubin Quotes

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages.

The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn't really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

Remember: A best-selling book usually follows a simple rule, It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told; not, It's a wonderfully told story.

Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that televison and movies can't. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They'd never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don't analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives.

I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

Probably a good idea, let me know how it ends" "I already know how it ends" "You read the ending first?" "I always read the ending before I commit to the whole book." "If you know how it ends, why read the book?" "I don't read for the ending. I read for the story".

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story.

The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.

I'm generally not a social dramatist or comedy writer. My interests have always been more in psychological stories or personal relations and comic ideas.

I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?

Storytelling wise, you've gotta take it as far as you can possibly take it with each individual movie. If you're holding out something for a sequel or some cliff-hanger, that's not how I think of a satisfying story.

I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and -- using them -- I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new.

Trying to find the story within the story was hard. Filmmaking is such a reductive process in a strange way and you keep whittling away to what is essential.

I've realized that in all the great stories, even if there's a happily-ever-after ending, there's something sad.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.

Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.