Sara Shepard Quotes

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

Everybody has their story to tell.

If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.

Always I try to write about people. People are interested in other people always.

Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.

I think being a singer-songwriter... your job is to tell a story that other people can't really tell themselves.

I don't know if I've ever written anything that's not a bill! I do write stories but I don't put a stamp on them. I wrote a story for my wife over Christmas and gave it to her as a present because she asked me to, but I don't put a stamp on things and send them to people.

Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

I write on scraps of paper. I do it every other day. I write about people's lives or how people look or my experiences. I'm very detailed - it's like a script.

When I discovered that I could write music, it felt like the most natural way for me to connect with people and tell my stories. I've always thought of that as what I do: I tell stories.

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.