For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.
Nora Roberts

Mary Stewart will always be my goddess. I can pick up one of her early books - one I've read a dozen times - and still slide right into the story.
Nora Roberts

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.
Nora Roberts

I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.
Nora Roberts

I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers.
Jackie Collins

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Lynn Abbey

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
Lynn Abbey

I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Lynn Abbey

It's very simple, I just tell my sad story, and people weep.
Corazon Aquino

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
Paul Samuelson

Always expect the unexpected. Right around Thanksgiving, when the new Alex Cross will be out. It's called Four Blind Mice and it's a pretty amazing story about several murders inside the military.
James Patterson

I'm telling a Richard Pryor story through me.
Mike Epps

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.
Alan Alda

I laughed all the way through Love Story.
Paul Lynde

I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.
Stephen Sondheim

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
Stephen Sondheim

If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
Stephen Sondheim

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.
William Shatner

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.
William Shatner