Quotes About Storytelling

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.

The way that I work as an actress, I always prefer to read the whole story and tell the whole story and feel what the whole story's going to be, the journey for the audience and how it ebbs and flows, the highs and the lows.

I'd love to do a project that falls between drama and comedy - a dramedy with hilarious moments.

With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.

He heard me through in silence, for it was a rule with him never to interrupt a narrator. He used to say, You will generally get at more, and in a better fashion, if you let any narrative take its own devious course, without the interruption of requested explanations. By the time it is over, you will find the questions you wanted to ask mostly vanished.

I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.

To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can't do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can't be done. And it can't be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it. There's intuition involved, and stretching—trying things that are at the limit of our abilities.

Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively). Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarrate joyfully. It's like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, "correct" viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters. In other words, like life.

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We'd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

I'd say there's a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer's work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.

Las narraciones son ensayos para la muerte.

The Lanyons had their heads together over a book of pictures, Venetia on the floor beside the sofa, and Aubrey explaining them to her, and the pair of them looking up every now and then at his lordship and pelting

The Monk then undertook to tell us the history of the world -- an over-ambitious project, I thought, but it passed the time.

Mr. Carter spoke, "I think your grandfather will be glad to help. I can go to Greenfield and tell him the whole story." He looked at his watch and got up quickly. "Good-by, children, and the best of luck." In one minute he was gone. Benny said, "Mystery men work fast, don't they?

She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.

I love being on 'Smackdown.' I feel like there is so much more opportunity, and we get to tell such fun, interesting stories. Everyone wants to work together to create gold - it's the best locker room I have ever been in throughout my whole career.

That's one of the beauties of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim and their work together. They have such a depth to the emotional exploration of the story that they're telling, but there's always a release, and the release is a laugh.

We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.

Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with 'Titanic.'

The other thing is we have an incredible villain. And we worked very hard to have villains that are connected to the hero. They have an effect, an emotional effect. They never become out-of-this-world, crazy villains.

I didn't care about a Dean Malenko; I'm sorry, Dean, I actually like you, you're a nice guy personally, amazing worker in the ring, but it's just boring if you can't tell me a story?

Storytelling in Appalachian culture - it runs deep. You have these communities and families that, for a long time, were isolated, and if you did have time off after working to keep everything going, you'd sit around and just yak, just talk and tell tall tales and flat-out lies and try to one-up the guy who just told a story.