Julio Cortazar Quotes

I'm looking for stories that make me sit up and take notice. For engagement with language and style in ways that the genre doesn't see enough of.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

Good stories are constructed, not found.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

People just want good stories.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.

Some stories wait their turn to be told, others just tap you on the shoulder and insist you tell them.

An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.

Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

When you're putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.

There are tons of stories out there. I read a lot of scripts on a weekly basis. I'm looking for stories to tell and stories that I hope will be interesting to an audience.