Quotes About Storytelling

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito.

My dad is the funniest human being I've ever met in my life - for years, I'd watch him hold court in whatever situation he was in; he was the most amazing raconteur. I often feel I've hijacked what should have been his career.

You don't have to be the most amazing writer, you don't have to get top marks in your English GCSE, you just have to be someone who can tell a good story, and tell it right, and tell it well.

'Coco' is shaping up to be one of the most beautiful films we've made.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Lyrically, the most important thing for me is, how can I tell a cohesive story?

Sound is the most important thing on any film, especially documentaries.

One of the most powerful things we have is to tell our story.

I like the 'Moth' podcast a lot. I listen to that.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

A film should be an experience. You should feel something. It should motivate you to feel something.

I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.

I'm such a dork, but I really think there are derivatives to be found between story arcs and character motivations. And the way you evaluate functions is a really interesting way to look at stories and the way you act. I really believe it.

I like to give kids motivation and tell them my story.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

I'm not sure what the moral is here...I really just wanted to tell that story.

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.