Quotes About Storytelling

Am I in earnest? Oh dear no! Don't you know that this is a fairy tale, and all fun and pretence; and that you are not to believe one word of it, even if it is true?

The library was magical because every time I walked through the door, there were literally thousands of voices ready and willing to have a conversation with me. I walked through the door, stared at all those stacks and bindings, and whispered, Tell me a story.

Because it's a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't story-telling what being human is all about?

Language is what we use to tell stories, transmit knowledge, and build social bonds. It comforts, tickles, excites, and destroys. Every society has language, and somehow we all learn a language in the first few years of our lives, a process that has been repeated for as long as humans have been around. Unlike swimming, using Microsoft Windows, or making the perfect lemon souffle — which some of us never manage to do — learning a language is a task we can all take for granted.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

Tant que les lions n'auront pas leurs propres historiens, l'histoire de la chasse glorifiera toujours le chasseur

If you spend enough time with your characters, plot simply happens.

Ruthie handed me a leather-bound notebook and said she wanted me to fill it with everything I could remember.

Every song, just like every person, has a story....All good songs leak from a broken heart. And the good ones don't give you something, as much as they take what's already inside and blow on the embers. [Mack Strum]

Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative.

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.

I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

'The Missing Picture' is about my story and my parents. Before this film, I never said 'I' in a film, so it is very personal.

I'll say there's a lot of good athletes out there, but the key thing that I see missing is being able to put it all together in order to tell a story. In every match you can tell a story.

I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

I try to mix the characters up and not be second guessed by the audience.

I think there's this idea that if we put up a play with all African-Americans or all Latinas, or even if we mix it up, then it won't really sell to a mainstream audience. At the end of the day, what's going to drive the story being told is what's going to drive people to the seats.

There's an interesting mix to 'Robin Hood' because it's kind of modern but medieval. There is a blend of adventure with a very modern feel.

Comics deal with fundamental archetypes. We've been called the myth-makers of the modern age.

I kind of feel like the job of actors and writers and people who make television and movies is to keep people company. In whatever modest way I'm able to accomplish that, I want to.

As a listener, we're looking for that person who kind of excites the molecules within us - who knows how to tell the story that resonates deeply to our core and almost prompts us into action. Fats Waller has been that person for decades. When people need a lift, sometimes they go to him. I know I do.

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

I love 'Boardwalk Empire,' but there were moments where I thought it didn't have the constant through-line that 'Breaking Bad' did and 'Better Call Saul' does.