Charles de Lint Quotes

Once upon a time, something happened, and it was better than something not happening. The end.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of 'Once upon a time' shapes all the fiction I've ever written.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

I don't think we'll ever lose the desire for people to tell stories or to hear stories or to be entrapped in a beautiful story.

People love a good story, even if it's a story that has very little truth to it.

If you're a fan of anything I do, I'm always telling a story. I'm into that - I like it when you don't know if it was true or not.

But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

To survive, you must tell stories.

And Death spoke to them —’” “Sorry,” interjected Harry, “but Death spoke to them?” “It’s a fairy tale, Harry!” “Right, sorry. Go on.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.

The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined the differing versions came to be.

If ever there were a time there was nothing, there would be nothing now.

No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you're saying, 'Once upon a time.' That's what writing is all about.

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.