Byron Katie Quotes

When you believe that your problem is caused by someone or something else, you become your own victim.

We are really the victims of our own problems.

Any story is better with a little love in it, right?

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.

I was always an actress, even as a little kid, and fantasy, horror, sci-fi stories are really all about playing make believe. I just never grew out of that.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

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.

We don’t attach to things; we attach to our stories about them.

Use all the willpower at your disposal to make yourself happy. Construct the right stories about yourself - and believe them!

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

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies.

If you're a victim, you're always mad, but never at yourself. You're mad at somebody else.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

I'm always interested in telling stories that have a message because I really do believe that film is so powerful.

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

I don't necessarily think stories have functions any more than diamonds have functions, or the sky has a function... Stories exist. They keep us sane, I think. We tell each other stories, we believe stories. I love watching the slow rise of the urban legend. They're the stories that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.

More and more of our finest actors are finding room for themselves in the world of television - but I truly believe it's because some of the best stories are being told there.

It's so pretentious, but I believe that with comedy, if you have a good story, 90% of it is casting. Once you get the guys and gals in there, it's pretty easy to make a funny movie.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Stories are our attempts to share our values & beliefs with the hopes that we may attract those who believe what we believe. This is the basis of forming a trusting relationship. Story telling, therefor, is only worthwhile when it tells what you stand for, not what you do.