“Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“Again, Homer felt the nudge in his ribs, and Mr. Rose said, mildly, ‘You all so uneducated – Homer’s havin’ a little fun with you.’When the bottle of rum passed from man to man, Mr. Rose just passed it along.‘Don’t the name Homer mean nothin’ to you?’ Mr. Rose asked the men.‘I think I heard of it,’ the cook Black Pan said.‘Homer was the world’s first storyteller!’ Mr. Rose announced. The nudge at Homer’s ribs was back, and Mr. Rose said, ‘Our Homer knows a good story, too.”

“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”

“Franny’s Hollywood name, her acting name, is one you know. This is our family’s story, and it’s inappropriate for me to use Franny’s stage name – but I know that you know her. Franny is the one you always desire. She is the best one, even when she’s the villain; she always the real hero, even when she dies, even when she dies for love – or worse, for war. She’s the most beautiful, the most unapproachable, but the most vulnerable too, somehow – and the toughest. (She’s why you go to the movie, or why you stay.)”

“You are my work of art," Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. "Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you," Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, "but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.”

“That’s what I love about boys,” Marion told him. “No matter what, you just go about your business.”