Quotes About Storytelling

Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that's where writers must try to be artful.

It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.

For me, making a mass film is tougher. A lot of things needed to be intertwined into a two-hour narrative without getting too complicated.

It is very tough to make a short film. It's like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can't afford to faff around; you can't indulge. You have to get to the point.

Normally, when I write a tour show, it's got a title that means something - a beginning, a middle and an end - and some kind of storyline and ideas going through it over two hours.

The Masters isn't about Jim Nantz and his storytelling. It's about golf's greatest tournament.

Once, during one of the jubilee tours, I was in the car immediately behind theirs and I watched Prince Philip telling the Queen a story. He kept her laughing for 20 minutes.

The reality is that people need to be coaxed toward a musical. They need to understand why it's a musical.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

Some directors ask for a hero introduction number, a duet and a fast number towards the climax. Most of the times, these songs only hinder the story.

You never want your second act or the whole movie to just be this relentless march towards its goal. You want things to take the audience by surprise.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

If you have a movie that doesn't strive to go to a certain emotional point, you can do anything and it will be fine and funny. But if you have something pretty emotional at its core, you have to make it right. You don't want it overwrought or unearned. Everything has to be moving towards this one thing.

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

Neverending Story' was one movie I did see when I was a kid. On the little island I grew up on, they put up a sheet in the town hall.

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.

I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.

I don't design stories to fit some political ideology. I design stories about characters who I love and care about, while trying to make sense of an increasingly mad and toxic and insane world.

I used to tell really boring stories as a child, about my toy panda's nose falling off, or something equally dull.

With 'Toy Story,' which is a fantastic film but is essentially animation, you get to make all your decisions beforehand. 'Jumanji' is shot much like any other action film.

You have to decide what kind of story you're going to tell. For instance I would argue a movie like 'Toy Story 3,' which isn't realistic at all, is really emotional and involving. It just depends. I played this game called 'Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP' for iPad that is totally old school 8-bit, which I found very moving.

I remember when John Lasseter called me back in the late 1990s to personally invite me to come be the voice of Barbie in 'Toy Story 2.'

Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'

Each of the 'Toy Story's are telling an emotional story, but they're comedic. They're so successful creatively in terms of the stories they're telling. And they're pretty grounded.