Quotes About Storytelling

The difference with authentic leaders lies in the way they frame their stories.

I give you real world-changers like Homer, Jack Kirby, and the aforementioned Shakespeare as the archangels of pure story.

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After Lou heard my Guthrie song, he asked me if I ever wrote any songs about baseball players.

They had devised a simple story, with characters, with an objective, with a beginning, middle, and end.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story

La historia es enteramente verdadera, ya que me la he inventado yo de cabo a rabo.

L'histoire est entièrement vraie puisque je l'ai imaginée d'un bout à l'autre.

Tell your story. That's the secret of immortality. The one true way to live forever.

What's great about writing a screenplay is that the subtext of the scene, what is not said, can sometimes be more important that what is said. Again, dialogue serves two basic functions in the scene: Either it moves the story forward or it reveals information about the character.

Beginning, middle, and end; Act I, Act II, Act III. Set-Up, Confrontation, Resolution—these parts make up the whole. It is the relationship between these parts that determines the whole.

Before you write one shot, one word of dialogue on paper, you must know four things: your ending, your beginning, Plot Point I, and Plot Point II.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

Betsy started to tell about the male and female corn in Kansas. She got so excited about that damn corn even the producer had tears in his eyes, only he couldn't use any of it, unfortunately, he said.

And another: perhaps a version of the waitress story: only I haven't got it here. Make it up. Naturalistic. Jewel prose. Make out little paragraphs of what happens to whom. Then think it clear. Write it.

Worse still, Wally has hillbilly ADD.  He'll start telling you about a snake he killed or some chesty woman he saw and then branch off into weather because a cloud caught his eye or complain about his itchy socks, wish he'd eaten more for lunch.

Good stories will tell you that facing the lie is the worst terror of all. And there is no talisman or magic sword that is half so potent a weapon as truth

You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony—who tells the last story.

Do you know, sire, I think that if we live to tell our grandchildren about this war, they will accuse us of making it up.' -Marielle

I will tell the stork-man.

If you've a story, make sure it's a whole one, with details close to hand. It's the difference between a successful lie and getting caught. —From A Workbook for a Young Spy, written and illustrated by Aly's father and given to her on her sixth birthday

Only a woman could make so much out of so little. Give them a single fact and they'd fashion it into a story before taking a single breath.

I'm never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them and get to be friends with them.