Quotes About Storytelling

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.

Byron says he won't go there. He give Kenny and Joey a story about "Wool Pooh," the supposed evil twin of Winnie-the-Pooh. They believe him, but Kenny still wants to go.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.

You men always try to tell our story. You men always get it wrong.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

You know the story of the Harvard graduate comes to Texas a while back and says to his rancher uncle, 'Uncle Will, how come you can get heavier punishment here for stealing a cow than for killing a man?' Uncle Will says, 'Look out the window. See those cows out to pasture? See any of them look like they need stealing?' " Warren

Reading to small children is a specialty.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out

The fiction will seek the real.

The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.

Inmiddels is Luk bezig aan Ilse een verhaal te vertellen, over een kapper. Dat die dood is. 'En nog zo jong,' hoor ik Luk zeggen. 'Hoe oud was hij?' vraagt Ilse. 'Dat weet ik niet. Veertig. Tweeënveertig.' 'Zo jong nog?' 'Ja. Ik weet het niet. Drieënveertig misschien. Ik weet het echt niet precies hoe oud.

Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.

The past changes a little every time we retell it.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose.

He would like her to shorten her account, but he understands her need to tell it over, moment by moment, to say it out loud. It is like a package of words she is making, to hand to him: this is yours now.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

I like for things to happen, for stories to unfold. And if I can't find a good enough story, I make one.

He liked the way the story unfolded as he wrote, liked the way the answers just came to him sometimes, out of the blue, like they were true things just waiting to be discovered by him.

Talk to me," I say. "Tell me another fairy tale. Tell me something.

But standing in front of Midnight, knowing what actually happened, Tana could see that Midnight wasn't just telling a story to other people, she was telling a story to herself.

Stories tell a truth, if not precisely the truth.