True Story Quotes - Page 2

• I like when they say a movie is inspired by a true story. That's kind of silly. "Hey, Mitch, did you hear that story about that lady who drove her car into the lake with her kids and they all drowned?" "Yeah, I did, and you know what - that inspires me to write a movie about a gorilla!"

  Mitch Hedberg

  Funny, Silly, Writing

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• I think, ultimately, people are looking for real heartfelt true stories. They want to engage with them, they want to relate (to) them and, ultimately, they want to have hope.

  Shari Wiedmann

  Real, Thinking, People

  "Actress Shari Rigby talks about her “Beautifully Flawed” life". Interview with John W. Kennedy, www.beliefnet.com. March 2015.

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• All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Fashion, Lonely, Men

  Ernest Hemingway (2002). “Death in the Afternoon”, p.100, Simon and Schuster

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• Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

  James Boswell

  Hero, Character, Air

  James Boswell, Marlies K. Danziger (1989). “Boswell, the great biographer, 1789-1795”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.

  Jonathan Gottschall

  Meaningful, Lying, Mind

  Jonathan Gottschall (2012). “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Rare is the book that can actually transform us into better, more fulfilled people. Having combed through the research and documented case studies all over the world, Kristof and WuDunn present the clearest view I have ever seen of the human soul. A Path Appears tells us whether we are intrinsically good, why specific ways we parent our newborns help predict their chances for success, and how we can live lives of greater significance. This book, full of rich and riveting true stories, reminds us that human greatness is all around us, and even within us, if we dare to look.

  Ann Curry

  Live Life, Book, Greatness

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• Take a Nicodemus and put a Joseph Smith's spirit in him, and what do you have? Take a Da Vinci or a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare and give him a total knowledge of the plan of salvation of God and personal revelation and cleanse him and take a look at the statues he will carve and the murals he will paint and the masterpieves he will produce. Take a handel with his purposeful effort, his superb talent, his earnest desire to properly depict the story, and give him inward vision of the whole true story and revelation, and what a master you will have!

  Brigham Young

  Giving, Effort, Vision

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• They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.

  Jane Yolen

  Real, Thinking, Talking

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• Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Philosophy, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1411, Delphi Classics

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• I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

  Terry Gross

  Memories, Self, Knowing

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• One movie I think is just terrific is 'Bernie,' with Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. That was a great surprise to me - so witty, so entertaining, a true story, and I'm not a great Jack Black fan, but he's great in it. I think it's a gem.

  Robert Osborne

  Witty, Thinking, Black

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• Mine is a story about a teenage single mother who struggled to keep her young family afloat. It's a story about a young woman who was given a precious opportunity to work her way up in the world. It's a story about resiliency, and sacrifice, and perseverance. And you're damn right it's a true story.

  Wendy Davis

  Mother, Perseverance, Teenage

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• We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.

  Benito Mussolini

  Responsibility, Stories, Hierarchy

  "Through Fascism to World Power: A History of the Revolution in Italy" by Ion Smeaton Munro, Books for Libraries Press, 1933.

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• True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

  Harold Brodkey

  Long Ago, People, Stories

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• If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

  Thomas Hardy

  Stories, Moral, Parables

  Thomas Hardy (2014). “Thomas Hardy: Selected Prose, Volume I”, p.65, Anthem Press

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• My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.

  John Green

  Responsibility, Hopeful, Trying

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• Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.

  Harriet Lerner

  Stories, Matter, Storytelling

  Harriet Goldhor Lerner (1993). “The Dance of Deception: Pretending and Truth-Telling in Women's Lives”, Harpercollins

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• True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Lying, Believe, Borders

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• If you lose count of how many cookies you ate, the calorie intake ceases to exist. True story.

  Frank Iero

  Cookies, Stories, Calories

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• Infrareds on little people standing with some big heads,
  I was Captain Kirk, walkin' with a black t-shirt.
  LAPD, the nurse asked did my knee hurt?
  I was in pain, little Martians tryin' ta take my brain,
  Hospitals came, detectives wrote down my name.
  I was to blame, my life never been the same.
  A true story; I tell ya, it'll never bore me.
  My classmate died, my other friend named Cory
  Drinkin' 40s, he jumped out the project window,
  Stabbed himself with a yellow number 2 pencil.

  Kool Keith

  Hurt, Pain, Rap

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• True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

  Raymond Queneau

  Stories, Hunger, Deals

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• As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Truth, Opposites, Stories

  "La Nausée (Nausea)". Book by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1949.

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• Well, this is a story about books." About books?" About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind." You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel." That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Dream, Betrayal, Book

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.171, Penguin

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• I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

  Virginia Woolf

  Notebook, Phrases, Stories

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.137, Virginia Woolf

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• I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Real, Long, Waiting

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