Quotes About Storytelling

It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's all they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her. And really, really , when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.

All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.

A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it." A

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself.

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.

So this guy walks into a dragon's lair and he says why the long tale? HAR HAR BUDDY says the dragon FUCK YOU.

I suppose because it's boring to keep telling stories where people just get born and grow up and get married and die. So they add strange things in, to make it interesting when a person is born, more satisfying when they get married, sadder when they die.

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago.

Narrators may go where they please.

I began my life as a character in my father's films.

how we met." Roary pulled a cooked apple out of her—apparently cavernous—pocket. She munched on it. "You guys saved us from the witch. It was awesome." Jess shuddered, getting into the spirit of her story. "The swamp was huge and soggy and mucky and full of snakes and birds and the moon and quiet. But there's not much good building material in swamps. Not like orchards or mountains. Not for what I like to make, anyway.

And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome's veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You're not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.

You and I, we're no good at telling a story straight. It won't come off right. Like a dog reciting a sonnet. Impressive, but how much better to let him howl?

The Heart of Fairyland is a story

Maybe that's why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

It was a combination of old magic and a woman's wisdom with God's herbs, and most of it is lost. People then didn't write their wisdom down. They relied on the seanachai to tell the story aloud

I don't think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it's 2, maybe it's not worth telling my story. If it's 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.

De toekomst blijft, dunkt mij, aan de figuratieve kunst, zoals ook in de literatuur de toekomst zal blijven aan het samenhangende verhaal met een begin en een einde -liefst met een conventionele interpunctie- en aan het samenhangende gedicht, beide tot stand gebracht in beheerst en bekwaam taalgebruik, en beide hoe geheimzinnig van inhoud ook, aan de oppervlakte een duidelijk herkenbare mededeling bevattend.

For Leopardi the ancients and orality, uniquely endowed with the capacity to keep memory alive, were in fact one and the same thing (Z 4270 and note 2

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Though I have not lived in New York City for more than two decades, these storytellers – from the United States, Britain and Canada – have touched my heart with their openness, inspired me with their joie de vivre and deepened my appreciation for my hometown as a worldwide phenomenon. Welcome to our New York.