Quotes About Storytelling

Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't jut Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love and widows; tales to tell children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing.

and what constitutes the making of a true storyteller; someone who speaks directly to the reader's dreams with dreams of their own.

I don't plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.

No matter how fantastical the story, true life experience gives it credibility. Dropping in elements of your own life, telling bits of detail borrowed from your memory bank, give the reader a feeling of assurance. It's the old story about how to tell a lie. Don't make it all up, tell the lie with large dollops of truth. The truth can give foundation to the most outrageous of lies.

And nobody has ever gotten emotional over a James Patterson novel.

Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago...

There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock - perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else.

I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story.

So many people considered Rami a traitor, a lackey, a turncoat, but in the end he didn't care: he knew what he was doing, he knew he was getting under their skin, he was peeling it back, exposing the rawness. He was outnumbered, yes, but they would find a tipping point sometime, somewhere, along the way. It was inevitable. He had to keep telling the story. Repeating it again and again and again.

They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.

The deep truths of a good story, especially fairy tales, cannot be revealed through discursive analysis—otherwise, why tell the story?

suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He

The public never saw how producers and executives juiced up stories. Exaggerating some details and downplaying or ignoring others. How they went after something or someone, not based on how strong or important the story was, but what their ratings books told them.

Cui Pyrrhus:  'Referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis Pelidae genitori; illi mea tristia facta degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento. Nunc morere.

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].

Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.

Es esta una de las torturas y desgracias de la vida: cuando son incapaces nuestros amigos de terminar sus cuentos.

Who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him?

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

for there was neither pride nor regret in his tone; indeed it kept its level note, as of one who tells a tale so well known that the words have been rubbed smooth of meaning.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.