William Landay Quotes

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not." "Shouldn't the storyteller believe it." "The storyteller should tell it.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

I feel like I've been blessed. I see the world through stories.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

Others tell like it is, while I tell it how I would like it to be.

No story ever looks as bad as the story you've just bought; no story ever looks as good as the story the other fellow just bought.

Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was said, if a man receives what may be got out of it as far as it is true.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

But O the truth, the truth. The many eyes That look on it The diverse things they see.