Quotes About Storytelling

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

The experiences I go through... everything you hear in my lyrics is real. Good or bad, I take it all in and put it all on the mic.

Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

It shouldn't be normal to seldom see a single female face in a managerial position or on the boards of the biggest media companies, or to feel out of place sitting in a meeting room full of middle-class, middle-aged white men explaining to you how to tell your own story.

What I learned in 'Sons' is that I would come in with a blueprint of a season and how it would go, and I realized that the looser my grip was, the better it became because the story found itself. Things happened as I wanted them to in terms of the bigger mile markers, but the fun part was I never knew how we would get there.

There is more meat and mileage in complex characters, like 'Running with Scissors.'

The great thing about comedy is that the longer you've been alive, the more you have to talk about and the better you get. I've got some miles and some road savviness that some other guys don't have.

I guess I'm like Roger Miller who used to say that he didn't have as many jokes as he thought he did.

People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times - and 'A Christmas Carol.'

Every film's different; every story is so different. But I think I've always been attracted to try to take something minimal and to maximize it cinematically. To find out if I can I really go all the way with one idea.

I have always included minority characters in my stories, often as heroes.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.

A novel is a made-up work about made-up people in a made-up place, all of which is very real.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman.

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after. ...You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

When you are writing a novel, you aren't making it up. The story is already there. You just have to find it.

Wir werden sie ausführlich erzählen, genau und gründlich, – denn wann wäre je die Kurz- oder Langweiligkeit einer Geschichte abhängig gewesen von dem Raum und der Zeit, die sie in Anspruch nahm? Ohne Furcht vor dem Odium der Peinlichkeit, neigen wir vielmehr der Ansicht zu, daß nur das Gründliche wahrhaft unterhaltend sei.

We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail - for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?

C'est un fait que nous ne venons de soulever la question de savoir s'il est possible de raconter le temps, que pour avouer que c'était bien là notre dessein dans l'histoire en cours.