Quotes About Storytelling

Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell,' James Ponsoldt's 'The Spectacular Now,' Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Short Term 12' - these are really important movies.

Personal style isn't simply an exercise in parroting but rather an exhibition for our own stories - from the gait of our walk to the rhythm of our speech to the manner in which the necktie falls from the knot.

I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You only have 45 minutes, or 7,000 words, to tell a story, so every scene has to have a point.

The first things I remember drawing were battles - big sheets of paper covered in terrible scenes of carnage - though when you looked closely, there were little jokes and speech bubbles and odd things going on in the background.

I think when you're in the middle of a piece of work, there are things that bleed over into your life. You're spending a large portion of your day pretending to be somebody else, to tell somebody else's story.

Seth Meyers and I wrote a 'Spider-Man' comic.

I started my work on a lot of the 'Batman' books. So I've worked on a 'Batman,' 'Spider-Man,' some of the 'X-Men' books.

I liked writing with my friends and making our own little stories. Making a movie like 'Spider-Man' never even crossed my mind.

I consumed Spielberg movies when I was little.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

Lots of times when I'm offered things, I can't see how a story gets filmed. Either it's too internal or it doesn't have a strong spine.

Spinning yarns is a protection against the nuttiness... the greed, the hate all around us.

I want all of my films to be grounded in reality, and I think 'Midnight Special' is the most grounded film I've ever made, in spite of its genre.

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.

I never spoke out as a kid, I was never good at it as a kid, I was always too shy but I think I have a story and would like to be good at it and tell my story.

When I was little, my mum would take me to see the orchestra, tell me to close my eyes and think about the story the music was telling. I always spoke about colours. I'd talk about how purple the oboe was.

Indeed if we Christians so tell our story that Judaism is silenced, then we have not spoken rightly of Christ.

I talk only about my journey because that's all I know. That's what the audience always pulls me back to. There's a hunger out there for the spoken journey, just to share the experience, the strength, the hope.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

chanson de geste

What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.