Compelling Storytelling Quotes

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Yeah, I just finished a novel. Man those things take forever to read.

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.

Michael Harvey should be read by all.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.

People are interested if you tell stories well and relevantly.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

I just try to direct in a way that interests me. And, hopefully, other people will find it compelling.

Stories are the shortcut to the heart.

When I find material that gives me a natural yet unique character point of view and has well - developed characters throughout the script, it makes the hairs on my arm stand up.

A HUMAN ELEMENT is an elegant and haunting first novel. Unrelenting, devious but full of heart. Highly recommended.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons.

I love piecing together intricate thoughts that people find compulsively readable and they can't put down.

I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.