Quotes About Storytelling

My job is to entertain the readers in such a manner that, when they reach the end of the book, they feel like they've gotten their money's worth.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

The reason I choose the stories I choose - and it's why it takes me so long to find ideas - is that I'm looking for that very thing. I want an idea that begins, I want a middle that is compelling and will bring readers along, and I definitely want an ending.

Should a story be readily told in a PG-13 fashion, it should be for creative, not business, reasons.

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.

Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.

Peter Rabbit's not a rabbit. Peter Rabbit is a proxy for the child who reads the book, and they imagine themselves in the rabbit's position.

When I was in college, I did sort of want to be a journalist. Being an actor, you kind of have the same interest. You go into a story, and you tell it from your point of view for people who aren't there. That's what an actor does with a character. But the real life is more more interesting.

In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.

Taking nuances from real life will help you make scenes that have never been done before. It keeps the story interesting.

In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody's got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

My goal would be to make Frank Capra-type films about real people, how they define their reality.

When you're playing a real person, there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

While 'Precious' isn't a real person, it's someone's story, and it's too many peoples' story.

Every field piece I did on 'The Daily Show' was a story that lasted five to six minutes. We had a protagonist, we had an antagonist and often put them at odds. We knew the story we wanted to tell before we went in, and often it was about plugging whatever character you have - in this case, a real person - into said part.

Real power is having the ability and the resources to tell an amazing story or to say 'yes' to a filmmaker and change not only the filmmaker's life but the world.

When a story is flying along, and I'm so into it that my 'real' world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a 'flow state,' and it's better than publication, money, awards, fame.

I think that distributors and marketing companies realise that there are a huge number of women over 40 who want to go the cinema and see films about themselves. Women of my age don't want to be force-fed with stuff about 25-year-olds.

The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.

The beauties of the game may be lost on some of us sometimes, but many children will read about football when they will read nothing else, not for realism or glamour but for romance.