“If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen… A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.”

“And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.”

“The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.”

“I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.”

“The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.”

“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”

“It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.”

“Positivism … implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.”

“He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves.
She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street."
Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath.
It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her.”

“A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”