Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales.

Don't try to tailor yourself to somebody else's story because you might just deprive the world of the beautiful story that would have been you.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

Tell him, ‘Let not the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off.

I don’t like to contaminate a good story with truth, Em. That’d be a violation of my artistic integrity, wouldn’t it?

You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

When you hear a story, do you believe only the nice parts? Truth isn’t like a baked fish, where you can eat the flesh and leave the bones and skin. You have to eat it all.

You've gotta stop making stuff up.

Once you even acknowledge that there is a line, that there are things you shouldn’t be allowed to joke about, that there are words that can’t be said no matter the context, you’re selling out the very idea of comedy.

Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

It was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn't really want in the first place.

“Don’t be sentimental,” he chided. “Memories aren’t enough.”
It was fruitless to argue the niceties of that: he was telling her that he was in pain; he didn’t want platitudes or metaphysics.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination