Talk:Story

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I was in a bad place before I started high school and you helped me. Even if you didn't know what I was talking about or know someone who has gone through it, you made me not feel alone. Because I know there are people who say all these things don't happen. And there are people who forget what it's like to be 16 when they turn 17. I know these will all be stories someday. And our pictures will become old photographs. We'll all become somebody's mom or dad. But right now these moments are not stories. This is happening, I am here and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you're not a sad story. You are alive, and you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you're listening to that song and that drive with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment I swear, we are infinite.
- Stephen Chbosky, in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), a film based on his 1999 novel of the same name.

Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?
There will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.
- Roger Ebert, in Review of To the Wonder (6 April 2013), this was the last movie review which Ebert filed before his death.

Last year, initially The Scotsman newspaper — being Scottish and J. K. Rowling being Scottish — and because of the English tendency to try and tear down their idols, they kept trying to build stories which said J. K. Rowling ripped off Neil Gaiman. They kept getting in touch with me and I kept declining to play because I thought it was silly. And then The Daily Mirror in England ran an article about that mad woman who was trying to sue J. K. Rowling over having stolen muggles from her. And they finished off with a line saying [something like]: And Neil Gaiman has accused her of stealing.
Luckily I found this online and I found it the night it came out by pure coincidence and the reporter's e-mail address was at the bottom of the thing so I fired off an e-mail saying: This is not true, I never said this. You are making this up. I got an apologetic e-mail back, but by the time I'd gotten the apologetic e-mail back it was already in The Daily Mail the following morning and it was very obvious that The Daily Mail‘s research [had] consisted of reading The Daily Mirror. And you're going: journalists are so lazy.
- Neil Gaiman, in January magazine interview (2002)

If you start getting scared of what story you’re telling, it’s going to show. You have to be kind of stupidly fearless, I think, to do this stuff, because otherwise you’re going to try to please people. And that’s not what we’re in the business of doing. Which is weird, because we’re in the video game business — we want to please people so that they’re going to have an entertaining experience, but we’re not trying to make people super-comfortable with everything. We want to challenge people, and we want to challenge ourselves, too.
- Ken Levine, "BioShock Infinite Creator Ken Levine Says He Doesn’t Believe In Utopias (Including Peter Thiel’s)" by Anthony Ha, Tech Crunch, Mar 27, 2013

[H]ow are mathematical activities like game-playing...? ...One makes sense of narrative, whether fictional or factual, by a mental construction that is sometimes called the world of story ...[which] may be the real world at some other time or right now in some other place ...imaginative effort is a standard way of understanding what people say ...In order to understand connected speech about concrete things, one imagines them. This is as obvious as it is unclear how we do it. ...I imagine myself in those circumstances and ask myself what I can see. Pretending to be in those circumstances does not conflict with my certain knowledge that on the contrary I am listening to the news on my radio at home. The capacity to do this... encourages empathy, but it also allows one to do mathematics. ...This is often fun, and it is a form of playing with ideas.
- Robert Spencer David Thomas, "Mathematics is Not a Game But..." (January, 2009) The Mathematical Intelligencer Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 4-8. Also published in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010 (2011) pp. 79-88.

I don't think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is to write the right story. Because some stories do live forever.
- Stephen King, in The Dark Tower, Vol VI: Song of Susannah, words of Roland, about Stephen King

who is "he"?

What do you think stories are for? These stories are classics. There's a reason we all know them. They're a way for us to deal with our world. A world that doesn't always make sense.
- Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz in the Pilot episode of Once Upon a Time (23 October 2011)

What are "these stories"?