Quotes About Storytelling

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

Relish being an oddball: Well-behaved, well-adjusted people are hopeless storytellers and, honestly, terribly boring.

I was a terrific liar as a child, and I believe my lies. So it's a natural step into acting.

I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

I don't expect to be another Walt Disney, but I do get a terrific bang out of being able to say things with pictures. Maybe that means something deep and profound about me - but I doubt it.

Believe it or not, my introduction to scary literature was 'Pinocchio.' My mother read it to me every day before naptime when I was three or four. The original 'Pinocchio' is terrifying.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.

You work with the communities to make films. And you just don't go in and take over their territory.

I'm going to try to tell stories and let each tale skate its own way into dark or light territory as the needs of the story steer me.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

Terry Gilliam, he's a really interesting and amazing film maker, and when he gets it right, it's really powerful stuff.

Terry Gilliam has directed some of the best examples of what I like to see in a film - one of them being 'Baron Munchausen.'

I want to put everything I think I've learned about filmmaking and storytelling and put it to the test in other areas.

Biggie has definitely stood the test of time. He's the reason Jay-Z and loads of other rappers are who they are. His flow and wordplay is brilliant - the stories he would tell are just nuts.

My own feelings of where I am in this world and the questions that I am asking myself, I started to explore them through the story 'Four Feathers' and through this actor called Heath Ledger. I knew that I had to find a 21-year-old who could play wisdom at the end. He's only 21 or 22, and I tested him.

One of the things I do is try to get a positive message out there in the local schools and tell my story. I also do a lot of faith-based speaking, sharing my story and testimony, to help show what God has done in my life and what he can do in others' lives.

The best bit about having a collaborator is plot. Plot is quite hard to get right. It is a testing intellectual exercise that feels quite different to being in the flow of voice or characterisation. I like having someone to construct a plot with.

It was a sight to make Zane Grey reach for his ballpoint, or Sergio Leone send out for another fifty foot of standard eight.

Storytellers broaden our minds: engage, provoke, inspire, and ultimately, connect us.

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,But the queerest they ever did seeWas that night on the marge of Lake LebargeI cremated Sam McGee.

What's more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

In short, from natural selection's point of view, it's good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren't accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.