Quotes About Storytelling

It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.

These special holidays give rise to various liturgical calendars that suggest we should mark our days not only with the cycles of the moon and seasons, but also with occasions to tell our children the stories of our faith community's past so that this past will have a future, and so that our ancient way and its practices will be rediscovered and renewed every year.

Human kingdoms advance by force and violence with falling bombs and flying bullets, but God's kingdom advances by stories, fictions, tales that are easily ignored and easily misunderstood. Perhaps that's the only way it can be.1

Talk is based on the assumption that you can get somewhere if you keep putting one word after another. —IBLIS GINJO, notes in the margin of a stolen notebook

Scoffin' a load of our grub an' not tellin' a story? I say, what a bally swizz!

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on my adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

In the Open Circuit, characters are supposed to have 'arcs,' where they grow and evolve over the course of the story. But Mom always thought that was nonsense.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

Any story worth telling is worth exaggerating.

People will pay a dollar for a program with information, but they'll pay $ 10 for a program with information plus a story.

Every story, the moment it's written down, will be reread," she said. "And every rereading will be a reinterpretation. In that sense, there is not an original story and there is not an original message.

around a proposition or an idea or story willingly. Some

And it is always the victors who write the historical narrative.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie.

If you're a real writer, you infuse your characters with truths from your own life. The old saw is, Write What You Know. I think it equally appropriate to add. Write Who You Are. Give your readers little insights into how you think. Share your feelings and beliefs in a way that makes other question their own, thereby requiring them in some small way to reevaluate their lives. Good storytelling compels us to do this.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

To Chase, a quad would be just a bit of fun. While he was taking care of them, he'd be telling you a story about some real trouble.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting.