Quotes About Storytelling

Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy.

Tell me a story. Be my storyteller.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

This country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told by only one group of citizens. Our goal is to give all Americans front door access to the truth.

Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

When I get to tell a story through music videos or TV, it's all about finding the story that I want to tell, so I'm definitely open to acting roles, it just depends on the story.

He likes to quote the Sufi poet Rumi: 'Travel leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller', an aphorism also attributed to the Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta.

Fall asleep reading a good book and you enter a world of dreams; fall asleep in a film and you miss the end.

I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time, that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am?

When he began to talk about Wyndham, it was almost with relief, as if his purpose in life was to tell that story over and over. To tell it until its last shard had been pulled from him. As he listened to himself, he realized that the story sounded practiced as it changed from event and recollection into language, as if each retelling were an attempt to scrub away the awfulness.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

That's how it is with werewolves. You have something, then you just have the story of it.

Stephen Graham Jones

And none of Grandpa's stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way. He had

If you have only 95 minutes of material, make an only 95-minute movie. Amazing how often that's forgotten.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.