Quotes About Storytelling

I wish we could all have a telling room, a place where we go to tell our stories and listen to the stories of others; in our culture, the telling room might be around the dinner table or in the car on a long trip.

Everybody goes through a lot of the same things, and I talk about those, and that's the key. You have to connect with your audience, and I might take them on a trip with me, tell them I went here and I went there and they'll go with me, you know, to hear the stories.

How do you tell a story that you're a part of without it being a big ego trip?

My guide had a copy of Palestine on my last trip to Gaza. He'd bring it out and show people what I was trying to do. That usually went over pretty well.

Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don't try to trip you up... they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do... if they've loved a story they love to know how it started.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

I think, in storytelling, people want to see triumph, and so it's usually nice to start with failure and see someone somehow rise above it. People like to see people try. And they like to see people fail for comedy, and they like to see people succeed for the drama and emotion.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

The desire to hear a story, and a story well told, triumphs over Internet, film and television sometimes.

With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.

The more forcibly I'm made aware of the fact that I'll never be the kind of storyteller I most admire, the less I'll be troubled by that. I'll probably just become more myself.

'Titanic' made me want to tell stories... To have all these characters and costumes and have ambition and think big and have dreams... It came at a very troubled period of my life.

You know, I've been hit with a Greb boot in the face and I've been spat on. And my kids light up when they hear these stories. It really takes their minds off their troubles.

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

If the right idea comes up, and it feels true to talk about somebody being in a truck, and that's the only way to tell the story, then I will reluctantly tell the story that way.

We would meet truck drivers, and they were like, ''Orange Is the New Black' is my favorite show.' And we're like, 'What? This looks like a Red State, Trump-voting guy, and he loves 'Orange Is the New Black?'' I think that's the power of storytelling.

Filmmaking is so heavy: there are so many people and trucks and teamsters and costume people and hair people and makeup people. I try to make it light and as simple as possible. It's great for actors. It puts the story up front. It's not about shots and dollies and lighting and sets.

Some stories are true that never happened.

I love that idea that if you know someone's story, it's impossible not to love them. This is potentially hokey but incredibly true, as far as I'm concerned.

Mos is a true artist who has a story to tell and gives back through his music. He remixed my song 'Different' in 2005, and the song we're working on now will be one of my future projects.

Every episode of 'True Blood' is like shooting a low budget feature.

Especially when it comes to something like the awards, I find it kind of baffling that 'True Blood' has been snubbed so many times given the incredible range of acting they have on there; I mean, incredible storytelling and the incredible production values.

Most stories in 'True Blood' take place over a short amount of time. I think the entire three seasons of the show have only spanned a month and a half of those characters' lives.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.