Amy Bloom Quotes

I've always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.

Those of us with this ancient compulsion to tell stories sometimes start with a single kernel of something.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.

I guess I've always just been naturally inclined to tell stories.

The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.

The only thing that remained consistent over the years was my ability and enthusiasm to tell the story.

I've always loved writing.

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I've always loved writing, and the impulse for me is storytelling. I don't sit down and think: 'What political message can I sell?' I love the creativity of it.

I don't think you can write - at least not well - if you don't love stories, love the written word.

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

The opportunity to be a storyteller is the greatest thing in the world, and I feel so lucky and really love it.

I want to tell stories for everyone, primarily.

Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.

I'm a good storyteller.