Quotes About Storytelling

Michael Morpurgo

We listened agog, because she was a wonderful storyteller. She could paint pictures in your head with words, and she could touch the heart of you too.

Dont pretend. Tell you tale. Speak with your own voice. We are what we write, I think, even more than we are what we read.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts

I was very moved by shows that combined things that were funny and sad. I remember liking 'Simpsons' episodes in which emotions were central.

Telling a story is like trying to eat grapes with a fork. It's always trying to get away from you. And if you're a good author, and you've challenged yourself, and you're telling big stories, there's more and more that's trying to get away from you simultaneously.

With 'Sin Nombre,' there are parts that I wish were longer. And with 'Jane Eyre' especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with - to spend with the characters.

My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.

Biggie was a lyrical genius: he was a musical painter with words. As he rapped, you would see the picture come to life as you heard his story. You hear a lot of rappers rap; you hear a lot of singers sing, but you don't see the movie in your head the way you do when you hear Biggie rap.

I fell in love with the legend of Paul Robeson as a kid. My dad would tell me all these amazing stories about his life and, bizarrely, ended up singing to Robeson on his deathbed.

So a lot of me is still a little kid, and I think that kind of helps alter my sense of reality - it makes me able to just become Belle every single night.

I like exploring both the light parts and the dark parts of a single person. And all of those shades tend to come out most acutely in stories about families.

When I'm working in finite serials, I always think in terms of the entire book rather than the individual episode because, by far, the vaster sector of the project's lifespan will be in complete book form rather than the singles.

I don't want to put 12 singles on an album. I want to make a story, a little movie.

I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell.

Anything to do with Anurag Basu sir is always special and interesting.

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'

For me, stories were brothers, sisters and friends, filling the long hours between childhood and adolescence, holding up a true mirror in which I might find out who I was rather than a distorted reflection of who I was expected to become.

That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist.

Flashback episodes are a tried-and-true sitcom device, but they always work!

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms.

When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.