“Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over.) And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.”

“Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.”

“The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.”

“Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.”

“No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.”

“It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.”

“He found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward - ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter - maybe less than a lot, but always more than some.”