Quotes About Storytelling

Stories are invented as you go along...

I believe, when it comes to storytelling ... that mistakes are often the beginning of the best ideas. After all, a mistake wasn't planned. It can't be a cliché. All you have to do is think of a reason why the mistake isn't a mistake at all, and you might have something fresh and wonderful, something to stimulate a story you never thought of quite that way before.

Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?

I firmly believe that a good storyteller's education never ends, because to tell stories perfectly you have to know everything about everything. Naturally, none of us actually achieve such complete knowledge - but we should live as if we were trying to do so. You can't afford to close off any area of inquiry.

So, the whole war is because we can't talk to each other. If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.

He was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.

I'll carry you,' said Ender, 'I'll go from world to world until I find a time and a place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time they can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.

Take one idea that you've been struggling with, combine it with a completely unrelated idea that you've also been working on, and see what comes out of the effort to reconcile both ideas into one coherent story.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Movie Cliche #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious and everybody gets the point.

Are you making something up in your head, miss?" —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener

where all is known, no narrative is possible.

It aint of a sexual nature is it? No. That's all right. Go ahead and tell it anyways.

The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one.

Then he told them another story and it was this story.

makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.

place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling.

Die Geschichte ist eine Sammlung von Papier. Ein paar verblassende Erinnerungen. Nach einer Weile ist das, was nicht geschrieben steht, nie geschehen.

My children were all made from paper and printer's ink...

Cornelia Funke

Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful, murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.

with every new day, Fenoglio's story was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as spider's webs and enchantingly beautiful

Meggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on weather or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her.

Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. William Goldman, The Princess Bride