Quotes About Storytelling

I grew up torturing friends and family by making super-8 and VHS epics.

A part of being an actress that is sort of frustrating is that the writers get to tell you about your character.

'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.

Telling the story from start to finish, that adrenaline fuels me and keeps me going.

Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene, and then you put it to bed, and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling in a way.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

It's always fun to make people laugh, and then make them afraid or cry at the same time.

People want to create a space that feels like them - one that's deeply rooted in their personality. That's important. Your space is an opportunity to tell your story and showcase your experiences. That's why I think every material - down to your faucet - needs to serve a function and feel personal.

Fundamentally, I always find that most of the films that I've put out are essentially the director's cut. Part of the process with a director's cut is the leaving behind of certain aspects of the movie that we don't feel necessary because they aren't part of the dynamic of the story.

You don't need a high concept to make a great film, of course. 'Withnail & I' is not - it's probably not much on paper, but it's one of the funniest films ever made.

I talk about my life; it is the funniest thing I can think of.

I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.

I DON'T KNOW how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.

The man in the corner hollered, Tell it all!

When I am telling it, it doesn't seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are -- more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story -- one after the other. It is queer.

If you tell stories, you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to listen.

her power of telling stories and of making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.

If there was time only for a few words, they were always friendly, merry words that put heart into one; and if there was time for more, then there was an installment of a story to be told, or some other thing one remembered afterward and sometimes lay awake in one's bed in the attic to think over.

Tom's Cabin, and she spent many hours acting out

They were as real as Sara, and it was careless of them not to come out of the story shadowland and say, "Here I am — tell about me." But they did not — which was their fault and not mine. People who live in the story one is writing ought to come forward at the beginning and tap the writing person on the shoulder and say, "Hallo, what about me?" If they don't, no one can be blamed but themselves and their slouching, idle ways.

I look at Sarah and Emma, and I know that's what they want someday, to have an amazing story like this to tell, one where they faced obstacles but were brave, one where they made a difference in people's lives. And that's when I feel that big feeling again - the one I felt the first time I picked up Monster's bass - that strange sense that I'm becoming larger. Just by sitting here listening. Just by understanding how large a person's life can be -Janie

You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.

Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our chicdren, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.