Michael Morpurgo Quotes

If you put your personal stories out there people always connect.

I do research for every single book, regardless. For 'Double Dutch,' I learned to jump and learned the scoring system. For 'November Blues,' I interviewed pregnant teens. I like to get up close and personal with the kids involved in the situations I write about.

Every story I do is about people. It's my survival instinct - one person, one story.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.

I chose to present myself as one who comes from among the people, and I can be touched by their pain because I have my own.

I love talking to people, hearing people's stories; I love honest things.

There are far too many people for us to think about each of them during our short stay on earth—like the thousands of books in a library we haven’t time to read in an afternoon. But this is no excuse to cease browsing. For every now and then, we find that one book that reaches us deep inside and introduces us to ourselves. And, in someone else’s story, we come to understand our own.

Talking to people and hearing their stories, you learn a lot.

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

I try to tell the story about the song with the believability that I've lived it myself and I understand what it's all about.

All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them.

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

I've come to realize that people connect more when they know you're telling them the truth or some aspect of your story, some mutated version of how you are experiencing this life.

It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.

Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.

I believe sharing stories and experiences is the best way to teach people to empathize!

I think everybody wants to connect. There is nothing worse than feeling disconnected. And stories that really move people and make people care are the ones where they feel some sort of connection.

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

You can write a whole fiction, and you're talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you're talking to those people, you don't care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It's amazing.

My favorite part is being engaged with somebody's story and life, and getting a laugh with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for or not, and being challenged by the immediacy of conversation.

What I bring to the interview is respect. The person recognizes that you respect them because you're listening. Because you're listening, they feel good about talking to you. When someone tells me a thing that happened, what do I feel inside? I want to get the story out. It's for the person who reads it to have the feeling . . . In most cases the person I encounter is not a celebrity; rather the ordinary person. "Ordinary" is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. (p. 176)

Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter.