Quotes About Storytelling

Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

If you're committed enough, you can make any story work. I once told a woman I was Kevin Costner, and it worked because I believed it.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.

I hope that as my career continues I get to create and work on more LGBT projects and bring LGBT storytelling into more mainstream media!

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

My only want and wish, really, was to tell a good story. I wanted to do good work, tell a good story, and give the character a voice. Those were my only expectations.

I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work.

Jack Benny was, without a doubt, the bravest comedian I have ever seen work. He wasn't afraid of silence. He would take as long as it took to tell the story.

But, number one, I think traditional noir doesn't work in contemporary storytelling because we don't live in that world anymore

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.

Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.

In storytelling, the audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that they're doing it.

I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.

I don't want people thinking they know me instead of the character. Steve McQueen has loads of stories about him - who knows what's true? But it's great for people to fictionalize rather than know the truth.

Steven and I have worked together a lot and I'm far ahead of the curve than most people in knowing what he wants, but he knows far more than I know about what's important for the story. So, most of the changes he will make will involve story changes.