Quotes About Storytelling

The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame that is his story.

Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is "Let me tell you a story." Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story.

I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He'd learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he'd read.

The seductive love of narrative, when we ourselves are the heroes of the events which we tell, often disregards the attention due to the time and patience of the audience, and the best and wisest have yielded to its fascination.

should these tales ever become public, whether you have not given us a page of talk for every single idea which two words might have communicated, while

From the recovery experience of hundreds of thousands of people, we know that there is an effective way out of this constricting and binding effect of shame: to tell the story of our suffering to safe and supportive others. (51)

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.

Well, it was right in there where I lost him. That traffic circle is where he tore his britches. I never saw him after that. He has no chin, you know." "You told me that." "Captain Hughes of the Rangers used to say that if they ever hanged old Ski they would have to put the rope under his nose.

Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a "graphic" writing style combined with educational aims.

Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.

One could not see them without feeling it was the first chapter of a novel.

My tendency to make up stories and lie compulsively for the sake of my own amusement takes up a good portion of my day and provides me with a peace of mind not easily attainable in this economic climate.

Conflict must be personalized to the character. If you don't know your story people and motivate them, you won't have a strong conflict. A vague or general motivating force produces a vague and general plot. Being specific will increase the emotional intensity of your story.

real life can be fascinating, it isn't as marketable as a tale with a plot.

There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.

I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about?

For the story — from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who hear'd it made enlargements too, In ev'ry ear it spread, on ev'ry tongue it grew.

It is said that the first storyteller crept at night to listen to the gods talking in their sleep — so each tale collected contained the breath of gods.

It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.

Faith! he must make his stories shorter, Or change his comrades once a quarter...

One of the choice bits of fathering is telling fairy tales in the heel of the evening when the tireless legs have begun to drag a little and the running tongue pauses a bit in its outpouring. Here is fun and sly gleaning of lore and guide posts to pleasant roads and a hint of fine taste. A good story cries out to be told and the art of listening needs to be cultivated as much as the greatly desired gift of telling.