Quotes About Storytelling

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

Of course, you decide which story you want to tell. For me, it's been very authentic, so sometimes I'm super happy, and I post four pictures one after the other; sometimes I'm busy, and I don't. Sometimes I'm sad, and I post a sad picture.

If the film is not emotional, then it operates on a superficial level.

The only thing that's different about doing a superhero show is that you can have your hero do things that a normal cop in a procedural can't do. But the structure of the storytelling is universal.

I want everything quiet and simple. For me: walking barefoot, sitting still, reading, listening to stories and now and then telling some myself. Eating fruit, drinking milk, longing to create, but with patience and many insights.

Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him.

To describe adequately is the high power & one of the highest enjoyments of man. She was beautiful and he fell in love with her. The thing has happened to millions, yet how few can tell the story. Try some of them, set them at the painting; each knows it all & can communicate nothing. Then comes Shakspeare [sic], & tells it point for point as it befel [sic], or better; and now we have two things, love & literature.

Last, we may suppose that it gave pleasure both to relate and to hear wonderful stories, because such is human nature; and the pleasure can be increased, at least till the point of incredulity is reached, by exaggerating the wonderful. So some real happening at the base of an account may be reconstructed by shrinking the account down to the physically possible.

The writer must let his fingers run out the story of his characters, who, being only human and full of strange dreams and obsessions, are only too glad to run.

Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

My stories run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish the idea lets go and runs off.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.

She was too wonderful a character to be allowed to die and I realize now that I should have allowed her to appear at hte end of my book. [Ray writes about the character Clarisse]

I wish for you a wrestling match with your creative muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Once upon a time! What kind of talk is that?

Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.

I memorized all of "John Carter" and "Tarzan," and sat on my grandparents' front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home!" I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. I

I fell into my typewriter with it and came up with a brand-new, absolutely original tale, which had been lurking under my skin since I first drew a skull and crossbones, aged six.

There's a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right. If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.