Quotes About Storytelling

The Ancient Mariner seizes the guest at the wedding feast and will not let go until he has told all his story: the prototype of the bore.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.

Stan Bad guy can't win. It's a morality tale. One way or the other - he's gotta go down.

A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.

To tell a story, you have to set up your characters, introduce the dramatic premise (what the story is about) and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action), create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.

People call it high-concept but it's really having an idea which you can tell in a couple of sentences, so the head of the studio can call the marketing guy and pitch it, and the marketing guy can say, Yeah, I can sell that.

Architecture's original sin was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante and postmodernism.

It's not like I just have to go to Washington and go to the White House everyday, and go to the same press conference at 10 in the morning and then be briefed at 4 in the afternoon, and then get a story on at 6.

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought. Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

a truth does not take too long to tell, only a fiction requires so much thought

If you've a story, make sure it's a whole one, with details close to hand. It's the difference between a good lie and getting caught.

I was doing exactly the same thing as Aislinn: getting lost so deep inside the story in my head, I couldn't see past its walls to the outside world. I feel those walls shift and start to waver, with a rumble that shakes my bones from the inside out. I feel my face naked to the ice-flavored air that pours through the cracks and keeps coming. A great shiver is building in my back.

Where I'm seeing a dead end, he's seeing a brilliant new twist to his amazing story. I wish I could take my holidays inside Steve's head.

filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I've opened a vein with Zoe's story. I hope you'll enjoy her and pull for her as

you. Once again, my new novel The Girl Who Stayed is something different for me, although with the same voice my readers have come to anticipate. I believe that people are pretty much the same, regardless of era, physical space, or culture, and this is the essence of my storytelling. I strive for characters you will relate to, no matter where or when they may have lived. The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn't be more thrilled to see

whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It's also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I've opened a vein with Zoe's

Bards were terrible at keeping secrets. They insisted on putting them to music.

is out, as it always must come in the end, The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;

When Kokwa told the story, he didn't merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.

It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.