Quotes About Storytelling

Of course the Greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence.

Myth can be a kind of human algebra, which makes it easier to manipulate truth about ourselves.

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do--make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic I know.

I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Without story books is like a person with no soul.

Stephen King

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story," he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal Once upon a time.

And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there's a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down.

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's? If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one? Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

One of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing.