Quotes About Storytelling

In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say 'Hey, listen to me, and i'll listen to you', we're starting a dialogue. And when you do that, this healing happens, and we come out of our corners, and we start to witness each other's common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that, really good things happen

If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing, once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.

The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.

Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it's like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors. We can only say: it's like this—this story, this picture, this song.

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.

Don't let our skepticism turn into cynicism. Not everyone with a crazy story is crazy.

If you're Stephen King and you realized halfway through you've created far too many plot lines; you arbitrarily murder a few in the middle of the book. If you're George RR Martin; well, you just keep writing more books and murder them at your leisure.

What I mean is that if I'm making up something in my head using places and situations I already know, then it goes smoothly.

Don't give [the audience] four; give them two plus two.

Now you're lying, Dandelion.' 'Not lying, just embellishing, and there's a difference.

Dandelion! You're asleep in the saddle!' 'I'm not asleep. I'm thinking creatively!

Little dryads fell asleep listening raptly to the wind blowing in the trees. Little witchers fell asleep listening raptly to their aching arms and legs. Our eyes also shone like Braenn's when we listened to the tales of Vesemir in Kaer Morhen. But that was long ago… So long ago… 'Well

Everything has been, everything has happened. And everything has already been written about.

There's a grain of truth in every fairy tale

Not lying, just embellishing, and there's a difference.

Meet. Dandelion, ask me where we got the meat. I won't because I know that joke. Don't be a swine. Where did you get the meat? Crawled here itself.

There's a grain of truth in every fairy tale

a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.