Quotes About Storytelling

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comics.

In a sense, you have to grab your reader by the lapels and say, 'I must tell you this story, or I will die!

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive... from Crow and Weasel

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.

In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie

So turn off the television—in fact, why don't you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair?—and we'll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.

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

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world--

folk-tales are, at best, generally no more than lies set in rhyme.

Maybe Shooter was a writer. He fulfilled both of the main requirements: he told a tale you wanted to hear to the end, even if you had a pretty good idea what the end was going to be, and he was so full of shit he squeaked.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Through real-life stories, Kristin Kaufman illustrates the core idea of being present in the moment and opening oneself up to new ideas in order to become an authentic leader in life.

a story is ready when it falls from your face

Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies. Steve Martin

All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.

Storytellers need their stories to resonate with their listeners. So when you envision a goal and describe the action needed to reach that goal, you transform your vision into a portrayal that depicts what's truly possible to move people to action. While you need enough material (data and reasoned analysis) to flesh out the tale, you don't want to bombard people with charts and tables.

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story.

You have to jump around in time to get the facts right. Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn't always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are proximate, in the moment. Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred—or a thousand—years later.