Quotes About Storytelling

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

'Once' constantly surprises me. I think it's the power of the music and the storytelling that people connect with.

You can't mess around with young readers - you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

Even with a stable character, you want something surprising to happen, hopefully because that's what the camera loves the most. That's what is great about film.

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

At the end of the day, the job is to tell the story that you promised to tell and do it in the most entertaining and perhaps surprising way you can think of.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

I loved working with Ram Gopal Varma in 'Bhoot.' Surprisingly, he remembered my earlier performances and narrated them to me frame by frame when we met for the first time.

If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.

Writing 'Hoop Roots' was a substitute or a surrogate activity. I can't play anymore - my body won't cooperate - so in the writing of the book, I was looking to tell a good story about my life and about basketball, but I was also looking to entertain myself the way that I entertain myself when I play.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best for writing fiction.

I dettagli sono il sangue della narrativa.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story of the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.