Quotes About Storytelling

I'm just saying man is naturally a mythopoeic creature. What's that mean? said the Senior Wrangler. Means we make things up as we go along, said the Dean, not looking up.

Humans need fantasy to be human.

You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown.

If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"…was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"…well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story. And what if your story doesn't work? You keep changing it until you find one that does.

all men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear[...]

We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

May all your problems be fictional and of your own devising, and may it be a very long time until you come to pen the words 'the end'.

JUSTINE: Is the story supposed to be jumping around like that, from Mary's head, to Diana's, to Beatrice's?

O Muse, tell me the story Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.

In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,' I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could.

'Get Out' was born out of the genius mind of Jordan Peele, to whom I will be forever grateful for believing in me and allowing me to help him tell a story so dear to him.

I keep a journal, like many writers do. It helps in writing a story, as you can use an incident from the journal and put in your story.

I was always writing on something: short stories and journal entries of what had happened that day, always thinking about something to write down.

Journalism is about bringing people to an event or something that they couldn't attend.

So much of journalism is conveying a place and time that existed, to someone at a later date: giving a person the context and trying to make them feel as informed as if they were actually there.

You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

Documentaries are a form of journalism.

I've been writing screenplays for a long time, and a lot of it came out of the journalism I was doing.