Quotes About Storytelling

People who have passion for horror stories, their appreciation/my appreciation is looking at it as opera.

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

My favorite way of making films - and what has allowed me to get key scenes in 'Cartel Land' and 'City of Ghosts' - has been when I've been able to operate alone.

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

I came up in this industry at a time where you had to be a journalist. You had to break stories. You had to break news to elevate your career, to get to a certain point and a certain level in this business, before you even had the license to give your opinion, especially if you were a black man.

I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.

Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle...

Then you are quite behind the age," said the Water-rat.  "Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle. 

It was a fine cow, as cows go, but, like so many cows, it lacked sustained dramatic interest.

A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start. (Interview, The Paris Review , Issue 64, Winter 1975)

I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

Much has been written on the subject of bed-books. The general consensus of opinion is that a gentle, slow-moving story makes the best opiate

Tricky devils, these novelists. The ink gets into their heads.

Ognuno ha una favola dentro che non riesce a leggere da solo. Ha bisogno di qualcuno che con la meraviglia e l'incanto negli occhi, la legga e gliela racconti.

The more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.

First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story'.

Perhaps' could be spun endlessly into different tales; even telling herself all of them, she would still be none the wiser.

His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if...What if...' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

We often don't know our own stories because we doubt their existence, dismiss their importance, or we're distracted.

you can be assured that the inciting events call for you to sacrifice your comfort and ease in order for your story to move forward. It's easy to ignore such inciting events...It's easy to flee your story.