Quotes About Storytelling

One of the problems of being a storyteller is the cultivated ability to extrapolate; in every situation all the what ifs come to me.

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

The writing of a book may be a solitary business, it is done alone. The writer sits down with paper and pen, or typewriter, and, withdrawn from the world, tries to set down the story that is crying to be written. We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

All of Madeleine's writing, fiction and nonfiction, was an example of how all narrative is fiction, and all fiction can be true.

When I think of the children's books I love best, I realize that they're written on a great many different levels. Now the first level is story. A good children's book must hold the reader's interest. It must be first and foremost a good story that will make the reader keep wanting to go on turning the pages. But underneath that good story is buried treasure. No one person will find all of the treasure, but each will discover special joys.

The language of logical argument, of proofs,is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling,moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the free language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.

Fiction, in a less direct way, will teach me, teach me things I would never learn had I not opened myself to them in story.

What's a Sinbad?

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply 'pencil work' as John O'Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.

But maybe the simpler answer is that the more a subject matters to you, the harder it is to find a story you want to tell about it.

But in other aspects of our lives, I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.

Experience is the best teacher. A compelling story is a close second.

The best teachers are the best storytellers.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

My dad was such a great story-teller, a good teacher.

Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal.

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

Non capisci, Nimi sogna solo per poter raccontare. E poi, i suoi sogni, non smettono nemmeno dopo che si è svegliato, la mattina.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you-- My eyes are blue, I said.