Quotes About Storytelling

It's the kind of story that people tell. There are monsters in this world, to be sure, but there are a sight more storytellers.

If he can remember so many jokes With all the details that mold them, Why can't he recall, with equal skill, All the times he told them!

Travellers from afar can lie with impunity.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time".

One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

What so tedious as a twice-told tale?

A tale never loses in the telling.

A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory and hopes other people haven't.

Make'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Na?ini in oblike pripovedovanja se spreminjajo s ?asom in razmerami, potreba po pripovedi in pripovedovanju pa ostaja, pripoved te?e naprej in pripovedovanju ni konca. Tako je v?asih videti, kakor da ?loveštvo od prvega pobliska zavesti skozi stoletja pripoveduje samo sebi v milijon variantah vzporedno z dihanjem svojih plju? in z ritmom svojega utripa ves ?as isto pripoved.

So they ranged story against story, all insignificant in themselves but each with a meaning for them and their generation though incomprehensible to others; harmless recollections which evoked the monotonous, pleasant yet hard life of the townsmen, their own life.

Nije život lak, ni slobodan, ni siguran, ali može o njemu da se mašta bogato i pri?a mudro, pronicljivo, šaljivo.

Never let them stop you from telling the story you want to tell.

He showed me that words can do more than tell stories, they can heal, and as long as you live inside the dignity of what you write, no one can take that away that what matters most. Those who hate you can kill you, but they cannot destroy you or the ideals that matter to you. To be decent writer you had to give yourself over to the power of words and a love of storytelling. (203)

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?

I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

The stories they tell will be different from the stories I heard in the camp, because the camp was for those left behind, the women and children, the old men, the blind, the crippled, the idiots, people who have nothing to tell but stories of how they have endured. Whereas these young men have had adventures, victories and defeats and escapes. They will have stories to tell long after the war is over, stories for a lifetime, stories for their grandchildren to listen to open-mouthed.

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.