Quotes About Storytelling

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

As writer Isak Dinesen put it, "All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.

All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

El secreto de una buena mentira es no dar demasiadas explicaciones y aportar un buen detalle.

I wanted it to suggest how important it is to take the broken, painful, and discarded fragments of our lives and piece them into something whole. There can be healing, and power, too, in giving expression to what's inside of us, in having our voices heard and our pain witnessed. As writer Isak Dinesen put it, "All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.

Everything is the proper stuff of fiction. —VIRGINIA WOOLF

Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.

It's not meant to be a factual story, but it's still true.

Great-Uncle Merry stopped reading; but the children sat as still and speechless as if his voice still rang on. The story seemed to fit so perfectly into the green land rolling below them that it was as if they sat in the middle of the past.

When you tell a story, you shape the truth.

Acting is all about finding truth in made-up situations. I know that seems like a paradox, that's why it's hard. An actor's job is to be completely honest while pretending to be someone else, in a place that's dressed up to look like somewhere else, while telling a story that isn't true.

her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children's story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built....

This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children's story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built....

He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.

His grandfather, Carson Vandegrift, a Baptist deacon, was wounded during Pickett's Charge, and young Vandegrift grew up hearing war stories from him and other Confederate veterans in Charlottesville.

The way I look at it, movies are a different medium for storytelling than books.

achievements, and epic failures were all amazing stories that Orson told masterfully.

I'd ask him what the proctological emergency was, and invariably he'd concoct some scenario that would reduce us both to fits of giggling. Plausibility was strained.

I know you've all heard the advice, "Show, don't tell." The best writers don't tell you, and quite frankly they don't just show you -- they make you feel it, live it, taste it, touch it. Storytelling is about being in the moment with the characters.

No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.

I'd grown up with a woman who could make a heap of stolen parts sound truer than the truth. She could shade a story I'd heard a thousand times until all at once the meaning inverted and it became its own opposite. I was her kid. I operated inside the ethics of my profession, but I could spin like nobody's business.

history is not what happened in the past, but the best story we can tell with the available material

I think everyone who makes movies should be forced to do television. Because you have to finish. You have to get it done, and there are a lot of decisions made just for the sake of making decisions. You do something because it's efficient and because it gets the story told and it connects to the audience.