Quotes About Storytelling

ChrisGrabenstein.com

I enjoy working on a movie that lets your imagination run wild, it's great to be a part of and watch.

Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point.

It didn't happen the way one can tell it; but if once can tell it as it was, then one wasn't in on it, or it all happened so long ago that candor comes too easily. In order to make the story tellable, one has to separate and put into sequence events which in reality were so entangled as to be inexplicable...

The camerawork might be shaky, the plot might have holes, the audience might not even know what the film is about, but if your actors are compelling you can still keep people in their seats.

Die eerlikste manier om die verhaal te vertel, is stilte.

Iemand anders sal dié storie ook moet vertel om geloofwaardigheid daaraan te gee; die storie kan nie net teer op herinnering wat dit plooi na die eise van die hede nie.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

Make it interesting and it will be true: this is what story writers live by.

One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates.

I can't, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don't make a story.

That the boy in short trousers was already the man they'd known, the man who had always got the picture, had always pulled the story from the jaws of defeat.

You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here.

Kazim used to give me strange looks whenever I tapped a corner of one of his comic strips and asked what was next. He thought it was strange of me to ask. What's next is what happened before.

I was sad that Corpse Bride was so short. I would've liked to have had her around for way longer. She doesn't actually have that many scenes.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author." [As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website .]

He had however one great advantage over both his Pilgrim and Puritan enemies, for he wrote a narrative of his adventures in a reckless and amusing fashion of which they were incapable, and thus has kept the laugh forever on his side.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear,Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;Hardly a man is now aliveWho remembers that famous day and year.

Now, suppose you tell me exactly what is going on," Papa Pete began. "I don't know where to start," I said. "Try the beginning," said Papa Pete.

His father always talked to him—so Seryozha felt—as though he were addressing some boy of his own imagination, one of those boys that exist in books, utterly unlike himself. And Seryozha always tried with his father to act being the story-book boy.

Hello, I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. By true I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies and in the end, isn't that the truth? The answer is no.

Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own "real" world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.

Generally, men told stories to boast, but women were different. They wanted to look at their words in the air and extract the meaning, and if you shut up and listened, they'd tell you very interesting things indeed.