It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
~ Italo Calvino

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
~ Lord Chesterfield

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
~ Vaclav Havel

Life is too short for a long story.
~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
~ William Shakespeare

With a tale, for sooth, he comet unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.
~ Sir Philip Sidney

The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.
~ Laurence Sterne

Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a quarter.
~ Jonathan Swift