Quotes About Storytelling

I don't think it would be fun to write after inhaling art fumes. (What are art fumes?) No, I just make stuff up. It's easier that way.

I see films in theaters, and I enjoy films. I enjoy the art of storytelling, and the different ways to tell them.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions.

In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

Because that's what a comic is, ultimately: a collection of pages. It's not a flatpanel or a touchscreen, even though that's where it might eventually be displayed. It's a page.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

The photographer does the world a great disservice when she leaves her camera at home.

Makebelieve is a writer's best friend.

Some stories, some visions, demand celluloid film and what it can deliver.

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

As for advice—write as much as you can! Time's ticking, and if you don't throw everything you have into your stories today, you might find yourself on the wrong side of THE END tomorrow!

In fiction classes... you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence... But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare... The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do much noticing.

I just tell you what happens. I don't explain it.

Here is a drawing of a stapler:

I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, Where did you come from? How did you get here? And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.

Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line?

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and deeply seductive, storytelling tropes that you see in cinema.