Quotes About Storytelling

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

My background is part of my comedy. Your experiences are where the jokes come from.

You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.

Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.

I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.

I'm not an artist. I tell inappropriate stories and jokes and I try to make people laugh.

I think you make better jokes when you don't break logic for the joke, unless you make a movie just about jokes.

People want to see comedies where characters aren't sacrificed for the jokes.

I still like to shock, but the jokes are less sexist. It's just that, at one point in my stories, there was some sense of pride, some enthusiasm, and now I'm just embarrassed by myself.

Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.

Tonight, I'm certainly going to tell you a story, but 'tis a story with a difference because, unlike virtually every other tale I tell-in this case, I was there. And yet I know that although I was there, and I saw people who were real, they have since become somewhat imagined-because I now view them through my memory. That's something every human being does-but storytellers live by it.

We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas--stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.

Fear begets fiction and fiction gives a shape to fear

Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.

If you don't tell your story, somebody else will.

A good story is sometimes preferable to an accurate one.

When we were small, Rose and I used to play a game called connect the dots. I loved it. I loved drawing a line from dot number 1 to dot number 2 and so on. Most of all, I loved the moment when the chaotic sprinkle of dots resolved itself into a picture. That's what stories do. They connect the random dots of life into a picture. But it's all an illusion. Just try to connect the dots of life. You'll end up with a lunatic scribble.

I think ever since I was preteen I wanted to direct movies and tell stories.

Jane Addams, writing about her Twenty Years at Hull House, said, "People did not want to hear about simple things. They wanted to hear about great things—simply told.

Mary Lou Kownacki: "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story.

A quote he loved especially—and carried around with him—was from Mary Lou Kownacki: "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story." There were many times I wanted to be angry at someone, and Fred would say, "But I wonder what was going on in that person's day." His capacity for understanding always amazed me.

On George Eliot's narrative strategy) It also forfeits the great game of the omniscient narrator, which is to know secrets which none of the characters involved will ever learn, ironically taking their unhappy ignorance to the grave.