Quotes About Storytelling

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.

I wouldn't put myself forward to do a film like 'Changeling' if I thought I couldn't pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died.

When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.

People who can pull you in and take you on a journey, as opposed to simply adding flash. Again, that feels very clinical, and I don't respond to that the way I used to.

'Game of Thrones' is just incredible, what they pull off every week.

On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.

Kids know when you're pulling a fast one, storywise, and I think that even when they're being entertained, children want to hear the truth, just like adults do.

I've written so many songs that are hopeful - songs that are, like, about an old man that gives all his possessions away because he wants to help people. I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' just to tell a different type of story.

I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.

Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.

In preschool, I would plan out my show-and-tell every week to be funny and exciting. Then in first grade I wrote a play, and my classmates and I performed it as a puppet show.

No one wants to read a story where I saw a cute puppy on the street and I petted it. I mean, that's not funny. I only write about the funny stuff.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

Wiseman's films are some of the most pure cinema, and to take a journey in a Wiseman film is like no other. He's been doing it so long, with a body of over 40 films!

We lack good film scriptwriters. People like Anjan Chowdhury who could develop scripts of pure entertainers are quite difficult to find now. There are obviously some exceptions like Padmanabha Dasgupta. But how many scripts can one single Padmanabha Dasgupta churn out!

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

I would never make a purely autobiographical movie, because it would be incredibly boring. But I always bring something. It's usually some emotional truth I've experienced, like in 'Get Him to the Greek,' the relationship between Jonah Hill and Elisabeth Moss, I had certainly had that kind of relationship with a girlfriend.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

Think about all the great leaders. Think about Obama. Think about Clinton. Think about Nelson Mandela. Think about all the people that we know who are very successful in business, in politics and religion. What are they? They tell purposeful stories. They move people to action by aiming at the heart.