Quotes About Storytelling

'Black Mirror' obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It's such a powerful piece of storytelling.

The thing that I love about working at 'GMA' the most is the storytelling - there are so many different genres on that show and themes you can cover, so it's been a lot of fun.

What gets us excited about any movie is the social relevance and the character themes and the character journeys and like the adventure story.

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.

Obviously, you're trying to peel through 20 centuries of theology, speculations, church doctrine and storytelling. I'm trying to get back to the absolute basic story of who was Jesus, what did he say, what was he teaching, and what did he do.

'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters - to trust characters and hate other characters - but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling, in my book.

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

Getting on stage is a bonus, that's my therapy, that's when I can tell stories and it all makes sense.

Every patient tends to bury the most important story inside some other story, just the way new writers often 'bury the lede.' 'Burying the lede' is an old journalism term for when you only find out the real point about halfway into the article, but it also applies to therapy.

I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

If I were writing an article for the newspaper, it would be thesis statement, information, information, supporting arguments. That would be the setup. When I'm making a documentary, the pacing of the film and the way that you sort of switch from character to character - all of those are more about storytelling than straight journalism.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

You have very accurately described the difficulty of presenting my books on film: many of my characters are alone most of the time, and when they do talk, what they say is mostly lies. That can make for a pretty confusing film.

When you tell them you're a writer, they say, 'What have you written?' And then you've got to tell them what you've done. I don't ask a plumber what he does. Then I have to explain what I've done, and I haven't really, you know. I've just told some stories.

In the case of 'The Book Thief,' my research was hearing the stories of my parents when I was a child. But I started changing the stories when I began moulding the book.

My friend Markus Zusak wrote a story from the point of view of death, 'The Book Thief.' I thought that's a great idea, where your omniscient narrator is death. I'm glad he had that idea because I wouldn't have been able to work so well with it.

When we moved from 'Ice Age' to 'Ice Age 2,' we were really stuck; a story didn't just organically emerge. While I'm very proud of 'Ice Age 2,' from a storytelling sense, it's a very thin story.

With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.

I'm a storyteller, and I was an actor, so I have a fairly thin grip on reality to begin with.

I don't write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.