Quotes About Storytelling

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you….Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

I remember a television program I once saw [...] I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

Yes, good, kind Crake. Please stop singing or I can't go on with the story.

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

But if its a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity; it's almost as necessary as bread. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because the self is a story.

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated

Calling a piece of short fiction a "tale" removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived..

Yes, good, kind Crake. I will stop telling this story if you sing. Because it makes me forget what I am telling.

Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.

I didn't want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.

The stories the children whispered to one another - while they sat weaving their endless carpets, while they could still see - was about this possible future life. It was a saying among them that only the blind are free.

He was always so plausible. Many people have believed that his version of events was the true one, give or take a few murders, a few beautiful seduct­resses, a few one-eyed monsters. Even I believed him, from time to time. I knew he was tricky and a liar, I just didn't think he would play his tricks and try out his lies on me.

The war at Troy seemed to grow in song, poetry, and story all the while. As it faded from living memory, it grew larger and larger. Men claimed descent from one or the other of the heroes, or, failing that, anyone who had fought in the war, which now assumed the stature of a clash between the gods and the titans.

There are two kinds of tales: one accurate but not true, the other true but not accurate.

Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?