Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
[He Stopped Loving Her Today] is all about the experience of being alive and the thought process of consciousness, and then you have these polemical essay-type things going on for a couple decades now. Some of these music books are where you're going to see an anecdote of a person behaving without some kind of commentary.
One of the most intriguing things in management and in business is the role of storytelling - people need the anecdotes to do the work that they do.
There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.
Fellini was more in love with breasts than Russ Meyer, more wracked with guilt than Ingmar Bergman, more of a flamboyant showman than Busby Berkeley. . . Amarcord seems almost to flow from the camera, as anecdotes will flow from one who has told them often and knows they work. This was the last of his films made for no better reason than Fellini wanted to make it.
It's like that where these little anecdotes come through, and I guess that's what I like about books like that [He Stopped Loving Her Today]. Fiction now is so experiential.
Bill Pearson is definitely a man to talk to, especially in the afternoon when he's had a couple of drinks because he's got so many stories and anecdotes.
If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.
Good writing is about finding and exploiting anecdotes that resonate with the reader. In storytelling, it's OK if you only make one point, as long as it's a good one.
I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets. . . . you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.
Good anecdote--bad reality.
During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?
The plural on anecdote is not evidence
Sometimes. . . the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.
I'm no good at anecdotes.
Life divides into amazing enjoyable times and appalling experiences that will make future amazing anecdotes.
You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.
I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.