Quotes About Storytelling

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.

With luck, you were read aloud to as a child.

Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.

Storytelling is about patience, about making sense of the moments of pathos and beauty that you find, and about carrying these moments back into your own life.

'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.

I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

If you look at 'The Best Man, ' there's a lot of humor in that, but I never consider that movie a comedy. I felt that it was a drama with comedic elements and comedic parts to it.

I think the best romantic comedies don't have villains.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

Fiction is just that-fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It's entertainment. It's escapism. It's 365 pages of relaxation.

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

I think, you know, a lot of the business of comedy is taking your personal experiences and making them relatable to other people.

If you can't share your story, you can't sell your product.

You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that's it.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

In essence the practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.

One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I'd have liked to know the outcome.

I came to realize that my grandmother's stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind's honeycomb.

Stories always started this way, suddenly, and set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explan their lives.