Quotes About Storytelling

It's a simple thing he [Frank Daniel] taught me. If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.

I think I've learned that if you want to be successful, you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either.

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.

We can't tell particularly smart stories if we want to keep our audience big enough to pay for these big spectacle films that we want to do.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

The biggest problem is that people want to tell the whole story, and they write letters that are way longer than anything I could possibly run.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

In Mosca's experience, a 'long story' was always a short story someone did not want to tell.

True stories seldom have endings. I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.

Every story instructs. The teller ignores this truth at peril.

Join us, friend," said Kruppe. "Sit here by this fire: this scene paints the history of our kind, as you well know. A night, a hearth, and a tale to spin…

o There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth; it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.

That the epic journey of Homo sapiens has taken us from the savannah to space is indisputable, but we do not have one simple, comprehensive account of this multigenerational sojourn—and we never will, no matter how much we excavate. Rather, we have grainy snapshots, faded sketches, souvenirs of mysterious purpose, maps of unspecified scales drawn long after the fact, and stories which change with each storyteller and occasion.

Don't try to be different or memorable with your storytelling voice—be authentic.

The truth is, if you like long hours in solitude, emotional turmoil, constant self-criticism, and bouts of heartrending disappointment, you'll make a good writer. And if you can actually tell an engaging story, you might just make a great one.

Readers couldn't care less how many acts are in your story. In fact, if you write it well, they probably won't even be able to keep track of them. Instead, they care about the forward momentum of the story as it escalates toward its inevitable and unexpected conclusion. Let the shape of the story determine the number of acts, not the other way around.

At its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people, and breaking stories... and that requires virtually no technology.

A story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending seems to us an expression of something that is buried deep within the tale and can be brought to light in that way and no other.