Quotes About Storytelling

I have a lot of those 'Forrest Gump,' I-was-there moments.

When you're reading a book, you're always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can't really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt; there's pressure to keep the momentum up.

When people stop me to say they love 'Workin' Moms,' it's not just that the show makes them laugh or is a great escape - they tell me my, or another, character's story is their story.

With a monologue, you can be unendingly elliptical.

I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.

In third or fourth grade, I loved to sign stories and monologues.

Monologues are fun.

Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.

With 'River Monsters,' it sometimes didn't matter if the story was made up or exaggerated.

You don't really want to talk about 'Duke' in terms of, how many levels are there, how many guns does it have, how many monsters... It's got everything it needs in terms of that, but it's always been about the experience.

I love writing about monsters and food.

I'm not the monthly comic guy, and I never really have been.

During script narrations, if I feel the screenplay mood jumping abruptly, I tell the director, and they work on it.

I never fixed a story. I didn't make judgments, I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.

Everything I do has a moral to it.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

I find it interesting, the different rules that apply to journalism and drama, even though journalism has become more and more about entertainment, and entertainment has become more and more about journalism.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

I feel that cinema, if made entertainingly with a certain meaning, reaches out to a lot more people. It makes them aware of issues or things that help people to understand what's around them.

I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.

My low-budget films, more than anything, taught me that you've got to create cool, likable characters and great stories because, if you don't, it doesn't matter how cool it might look - no one is going to care about it.

You know, I remember watching Morgan Freeman when he did the two Alex Cross movies, and he's so confident that he's going to knock the scene dead. And I'm really confident that I can tell a good story now, so I just don't worry about things.