Quotes About Storytelling

A surgeon should always be soberly dressed . . . rather after the manner of a cleric, for any discrete man clad in cleric's dress may sit at a gentleman's table. A surgeon must also have clean hands and well-shaped nails, free of dirt . . . It is also expedient for the surgeon to be able to tell good honest tales that may make the patient laugh.

this Londonised a Caribbean tradition of story telling and use of language that had previously been the preserve of reggae. While that was to prove pivotal in the evolution of jungle, more immediately it was an important step for young black London in general.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

Creating authentic messaging with your story allows for the strategy, products, and security to come together correctly and create a melody that can be heard over the same old harmonies sung by everyone else.

Your story, shared with authenticity can do more to sell you than any sales pitch, marketing piece or ad.

contar historias es justamente esto: encontrar la conexión que logra reunir a los seres humanos más allá del tiempo y el espacio

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. We fill in gaps that make no sense because we want to believe something.

That's why I'm compelled to tell this story - don't we all have one secret that has shaped us we are burning to reveal? - to convince myself that I'm entitled to my own life.

I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know. I learned that I need to be very wary of my storyteller's potential for stirring up drama and trauma.

The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.

Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.

A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.

S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

Porque um contador de histórias não morre nunca, mantém-se sempre vivo nas suas histórias enquanto houver álguem para as ouvir.

The reader wants to be immersed in a story, not drowned in words

A história de toda a gente começa a meio da de outra pessoa, com meadas confusas de narrativa à espera de serem desenroladas. E de quem é esta história afinal?

I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.