Quotes About Storytelling

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I think I always knew I would be a writer some day, but it wasn't until I was grown and had children of my own that I turned to telling Native American stories.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn't write stories anymore; I 'produced content.

Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.

John Gielgud told us this story about Mae West. She was asked, 'Do you ever smoke after you've had sex?' She answered, 'I never looked.

Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.

By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth.

Ack! Parables. I hate parables.

I have followed my penis into hell and returned with the story.

To help you fill in the details of the world you are creating, imagine that your characters inhabit a real world. Daydream what it would be like to be there. What would your characters eat, what would they talk about, where would they get their supplies, etc. Keep asking the question, "What happens next?" Show your characters actions and write down their thoughts

That's the beauty of meeting in the middle of the story. We already know each other.

Heroes tend to gain improbable strength when their tale is told over and over again.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

in a story there is always a reader, and this reader is a fundamental ingredient not only of the process of storytelling but also of the tale itself. Today

Pentru a supravie?ui, trebuie s? spunem pove?ti.

By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something about the world.

By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

False tales are, first of all, tales, and tales, like myths, are always persuasive.

Her past life had become a sort of fairy tale, to which she listened gladly and asked questions. After the treatment had continued for two or three weeks she began to exclaim, "I believe I remember that!

Believe it or not, in 1969 the French writer Georges Perec wrote a palindromic story that was 500 words long! The whole story reads the same backwards as forwards.

I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.

Nun aber weiter, mein Gast, sagte sie [Dido], berichte uns ganz von Anfang die Listen der Danaer, den Untergang der Deinen und deine Irrfahrten [...]