Quotes About Storytelling

I go into every story thinking I'm going to fail. I think about that all the time - I think it's going to be terrible. Every story is like the first I've ever done.

I think there is a time, if I can say this; there is a time in a message where you might just tell a story to give your audience a break.

The great thing about film is you start and finish. It's a journey that lasts so long, TV lasts a long time.

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

There's a lot that you can do in television that you can't do with a film, theoretically. At the time, the only possibility was to do a movie.

Every single time I read a script I'm breathless as I turn the pages.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

Australian History: .... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.

I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction

No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words can be uninteresting.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain. The truth should never be permitted to stand in the way of a good story.

SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can. Most

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you—every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.

Cuando se escriben novelas sobre adultos, uno sabe donde tiene que parar: esto es, en la boda. Pero cuando se escribe una novela sobre jóvenes, hay que parar donde mejor se pueda.

Le romancier qui écrit une histoire d'adulte sait exactement où et comment s'arrêter, c'est le plus souvent par un mariage. Quand il s'agit d'un enfant, il s'arrête où il peut.

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.