Chris Cleave Quotes

Our stories are the tellers of us.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

I write largely plot-driven stories.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

I love writing family stories.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

I tell a story, and therefore I exist.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.