Quotes About Storytelling

Just so you know, when they say Once upon a time" . . . they're lying

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

Just so you know, when they say once upon a time....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Anderson's influence.

Movies are dreams! And they work on you subliminally.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

When Noam was a kid and felt picky about choking down gefilte fish on Pesach, his dad sat him down and told him the story of la pobre viejecita. Once upon a time, there was an old lady with nothing to eat but meat, fruit and sweets... and he'd flop another lump of poached fish on Noam's plate and say, "God bless us with the poverty of that poor old woman.

Sometimes I think we need to tell our stories more than anyone needs to hear our stories. Maybe just so that anticipation or happiness can be reached for again. But other times it is almost as if the story itself wants repeating. So that the strand of hair caught in a kiss or the turn of a beautiful face isn't lost forever. So that, especially when it comes to beauty, we're not alone and left with the burden of remembering.

Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie.

Let's see, he had told me one night at our hotel's bar, I've been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn,

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.

Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.' 'Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.' 'When are we happy?' 'When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.' 'What is regret?' 'To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.' 'What is sorrow?' 'To long for the past.' 'What is the highest pleasure?' 'To hear a good story.

My gut feeling about sequels is that they should be premeditated: You should try to write a trilogy first or at least sketch out a trilogy if you have any faith in your film.

So imagine: Dungeons and Dragons [is] a table filled with artists, whether they're painters, whether they're actors, whether they're poets … - whatever they are, they are able to live in this world of imagination.

Les morts font de ceux qui restent des fabricateurs de récits.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.