Quotes About Storytelling

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

Our cinema is coming of age, and people are realizing we need to tell different stories differently and in fresh manner and not just do formula stuff and serve it to the audience.

Adrian Leon LeBlanc, my dad and my namesake, his keen joy in observing people and the world is the reason I became a journalist.

On 'Modern Family,' we have outlines, really strong outlines, when we go off to draft, so you have a reasonable expectation that that will be the story of your episode.

I really enjoy working with people who have come into this industry for what I think are really admirable reasons. People who really want to tell brilliant stories and do it in the most effective way possible.

I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.

I lived with my grandmother for a year when I was very young, and even to this day, when I tell my mother events that took place, she can't believe that I can recall that far.

TV is obviously so different from film: because it's a never-ending process, it keeps going; you keep receiving new pages.

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

I always feel like a script is a recipe, and then you bring the elements into the recipe, and you cook with it.

My dad likes to recite the story of 'Pablo the Donkey' before dinner to teach us the real meaning of Christmas. Every year, it's the same; every year, we cringe!

Christopher Walken would make a bed time story pretty interesting I reckon.

The set of '12 Years a Slave' was an extremely joyous one! We all recognized that we were making a powerful, necessary and beautiful film, and we weren't about doing it without that sense of responsibility, and we recognized that we needed each other to tell this story. We also knew we needed to hold each other up as we told the story.

One handy piece of equipment, which I recommend to any writer of fiction, is a set of Myriorama cards. I consult them frequently.

We write the songs that we do because that's what we like. But they are just stories - not things we actually do or recommend anyone else go out and do.

I recommend to any of you, that's always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

I saw 'Beauty and the Beast' at eight years old in theatres and spent hours trying to recreate the majestic imagery of that story in a drawing notepad at home.

Even when he transposes Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' he injects so much of his own personality and his own world that it becomes a Wes Anderson story, and you forget that Roald Dahl is behind the story. That's the proof of great directors to be able to digest and recreate sometimes a classic.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

The only problem with the way they do my character is that they have her get redeemed too early.

The idea that I get to kind of redefine what is beautiful and whose story deserves to be told and showcase that you know, big women have love lives and complex colorful lives like everybody else, that's really important to me.