Quotes About Storytelling

I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I'm working on a story, I'll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they've taken the story. It's as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. . . .

I am black - and I am brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.

It just proves good movies don't need 100 million dollars to be good.

May fiddled with her phone, reminding herself she was good at this and in control and that getting the story was more important than feminist principles – or no, not even that, it was that feminist principles demanded she tell the truth about this heinous act of violence against a woman and the blokey, misogynist community in which it happened, and if that required flirting with one or more of said blokey, misogynist community members then that was for the greater good.

It's a crazy kind of schedule but five or six years ago, I had an idea for a book and wrote it rather quickly. All of a sudden I found that two books a year, spring and fall, was something I could reasonably do. I'm always chasing the next story.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence.

I can't imagine a life without a story.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.

It seemed so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.

We gotta wait for your dad to park the car. Then we gotta hear the Epic Saga.

He told me, in case I shared the common notion that the old deserved death, it was hardly ever true. He had seen and heard a man recite verbatim five Damon Runyan stories, with beautiful gestures, and be cold dead in thirty minutes.

Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can.

Delivering your message with a funny or touching story end is the key to creating emotion and making a lasting impact in their hearts and minds.

When you just dump information onto your audience, you are not really making an impact on their hearts and minds. But, when you start telling a story, a magic thing happens: They instantly give you their full attention.

The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...

What, in the end, can we say about Rabbi Akiva? Throughout this book I have tried to keep in mind the words of the novelist Margaret Atwood in the epigraph: "There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

There is something very affirming about the idea that the narrative is the big thing, and it is not clear if it is good or bad, or if it is moving in a good or bad direction. It's just moving. You have to draw meaning from the whole.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.

The way I write isn't visually or stylistically dependent. It's usually one character that starts talking, and that points me where the story's going.

All fishermen are liars; it's an occupational disease with them like housemaid's knee or editor's ulcers.

I think what happens normally in a narrative film is that the camera constructs the reality.

Non-fiction or documentaries can tell any kind of a story because they don't have to adhere to the rules of what's possible. When you're making something up, you have to say, 'Well, this is what would happen here,' but in reality, stuff happens that seems impossible.

What was great about 'Cold Feet' is that although it flew off down all different avenues, it was really based on believing the reality of the characters.

For 'Game of Thrones,' I realized immediately that it was about the characters.