Quotes About Storytelling

Die Welt ist schrecklich langweilig, oder, was dasselbe ist, was an ihr interessant sein könnte, ist es nicht, solange es nicht von einem guten Schriftsteller erzählt wird.

I remember always thinking that life itself doesn't actually exist, because if no one tells it as a story or turns it into a narrative, life is merely something that happens, nothing more. To understand life, you have to tell it, even if only to yourself. This doesn't mean that a story can make life comprehensible, because there are always gaps in any narrative, whatever sutures or remedies you might try to apply. That is why a narrative only restores life in fragmentary form.

Me gustan mis fiestas de hombre solo. Son como la vida misma, como cualquier cuento de Felisberto Hernández: una fiesta incompleta, pero una fiesta de verdad.

This is the kind of storytelling that takes place at most startup board meetings. Most milestones are built the same way: hit a certain product milestone, maybe talk to a few customers, and see if the numbers go up. Unfortunately, this is not a good indicator of whether a startup is making progress. How do we know that the changes we've made are related to the results we're seeing? More important, how do we know that we are drawing the right lessons from those changes?

Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters wonderful

I think violence, cynicism, brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling, going back to people sitting around fires, the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of that tradition.

tabby ignored his thanks. "Just passin' through, eh?" he mewed. "I'll bet you've a story to tell. Why not stay awhile an' share it wi' me?" He stood up and braced himself, ready to jump down into the clearing.

Why was Sandynose such an old badger

For once she was telling him a story. "So Firestar—he was Firepaw then—was hunting in the old forest and he came upon this skinny old gray she-cat . . .

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

Human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.

So I started to wonder if I actually could reenter the unicorn's world…at which point Sooz came into my head and the story just happened. It flowed. It was the exact opposite of my experience writing The Last Unicorn. I locked onto her voice, the voice of this nine-and-a-half-year-old girl who was telling the story from the first sentence, and I just followed her. It was one of the very rare occasions where I felt from beginning to end that I knew what I was doing.

I'd become the unreliable narrator of my first novel.

Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future. You can tell the strength of an age by the imaginative truth-grasping vigour of its storytellers. Stories are matrices of thought. They are patterns formed in the mind. They weave their effect on the future. To be a storyteller is to work with, to weave with, the material of time itself.

I am glad that we reached out, and not only to explain the Fed's side of the story amid the barrage of negative coverage.

Nick Denton's core insight: in the newspaper era, the best stories were sometimes the ones reporters told one another in bars, rather than the ones they printed.

Tenements were a screenwriter's dream—lively, interesting places that lent themselves to narrative.

element that makes the record real and brings the story

Ich bin eben kein Erzähler wie du.

Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most.

A-B-D-C-E structure of a story, an acronym for Action-Background-Development-Conflict-Ending.

Don't forget the most basic reason we read: to discover what happens next. Make certain your devotion to pretty sentences and flesh-and-blood characters and cityscapes and exquisitely crafted metaphors works in service of story, contributing to the momentum that will propel your readers forward.