Quotes About Storytelling

Victims don't want to be proactive about changing—they want to be proactive about making sure that the person who hurt them pays. And so we spend our energy telling our sad stories rather than taking responsibility for our behavior. Thus we open the door of our hearts and welcome in the Trojan horse of bitterness. And it stands there, a monument, a constant reminder of a debt someone has yet to pay. Somebody owes us.

I'm not a romantic. In life I didn't have much experience with romance.

Juliette's story-telling function is itself part of her whorishness. She is a perfect whore. . . . they know how to utilize the power of the word, of narrative, to save their lives. The continuity of their narratives protects them from the discontinuity of death.

when you gain an understanding of the structure that lies beneath stories. When you understand the bone structure of a plot skeleton, you'll know how to build a story.

If you don't tell your stories, who will?

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

I don't work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream--now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock. In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character's head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid-out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.

Then they all jumped in again, sharing memories, telling the same old stories, because if they were talking about the past, somehow they didn't have to think too much about the present.

Sometimes she'd scream at him, laughing but irritated too. 'How can you just sit there? What is going on inside your head?' He was never quite sure how to answer. Stories, he thought. I just tell myself stories.

I loved Westerns for different reasons as an adult. It is not only our only native brand of storytelling - the only one that's not influenced by Europeans and not something that's done better by the French - but I also love the sensuality of the Western. The sights, sounds, and smell of a Western are very exciting.

What made us different from other westerns was the fact that 'Gunsmoke' wasn't just action and a lot of shooting; they were character-study shows.

Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape.

I like westerns, fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, thrillers, and I try to avoid the word 'genre' altogether. A good book is a good book.

Fundamentally, the way I work is exactly the same whether I'm making 'Whale Rider' or 'Mulan'. And those two stories are somewhat similar. They have interesting parallels, and it felt like I'd really come full circle, back to a story of leadership.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering?

What if you could radically alter the way stories get told? What if the way people wanted to consume content actually changed what you could make?

But for me, at one point I was like, 'Why do I want to make films that people want to walk out of?' What if I actually want people to engage and have a good time?

I think you're always drawn to what you love, and I'm always really drawn to things that feel really real and really true to me. I love things that make me think of things in a way I hadn't, and I love looking at people in the world in a way that I hadn't. And sometimes big, huge stories do that for me, but I think I am drawn to smaller ones.

With a bucket of Lego, you can tell any story. You can build an airplane or a dragon or a pirate ship - it's whatever you can imagine.

I like to make little movies or fake stories about something that happened in my life. I will make a movie in my mind that would translate the same feeling or emotion that I had in whatever just happened.

My fans don't feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I'm going through now, they'll hear about it on a record someday. They'll hear the real story. There's a little bit of lag time. It's not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it's much more accurate.

I hear a good song and I start thinking, 'Oh shoot. You know there's a story that can be told to this,' and whatnot.