“Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.”

“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”

“Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.”

“Yeah, she's heard the war stories … I tell it all to her. I think one has to, because one wants to know somebody, and one wants to feel that somebody knows one. I mean, the embarrassment quotient has been going down for a long time, and the fond amusement has been rising.”

“That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story.”

“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”

“But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.”

“Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”

“In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.”

“There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling”