Quotes About Storytelling

I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous story, and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author's perversity than with their own.

If you don't know the fantasy life of a country, it's hard to write fiction about it.

La narrativa o mueve montañas o es aburrida; o mueve montañas o se sienta sobre su propio culo

If you want to feel important and indispensable, read a story to the child on your lap.

Hell isn't other people. It's other people telling the same story for the twentieth time.

I'm a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell.

True or not, every story has something it wants you to remember. True or not, every story has something it wants you to believe.

I am a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell

No sólo está narrando la historia, me la está dando.

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.

This is what love does. It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot.

Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eighths-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true. "Okay," you say. "Do you want to know how I met you?" I nod. "It was on the carousel. You were on the pink horse, I was on the yellow. You

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, aposiopesis, the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven't gotten across what the experience was like. It's like telling somebody a dream. It doesn't give them the dream. So

It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam's journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are 'untold tales' found only in the margins of earlier writers.

Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.

The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention.

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, "This is boring." An hour later you could decide that it was the best thing you'd ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't—I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere—but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.

Story-telling is pivotal to our well-being, as are nonethnic jokes and riddles.

Her: So how was your trip in? You: Well, I was originally going to fly, but then this tiger offered to carry me very gently in her mouth. I said OK, but you know what? She wasn't gentle at all. One of her teeth pierced my small intestine, so now, on top of everything else, I have to shit in a bag every day for the rest of my life! Her: Well, that is just awesome. We're all so glad you made it.

A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, "Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.

David Sedaris