Quotes About Storytelling

Withholding things in a story is no good if you aren't building to something substantial. It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that.

I'd love to do a movie where the monster is human.

I feel like in telling stories, there are the things the audience thinks are important, and then there are the things that are actually important.

It's a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling.

No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever. So whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.

if you don't speak your emotions you serve them, and if you don't tell your story you lose it—or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it. Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane. We say ourselves into being every day, or else.

Just tell the story!

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Being a writer of 'literary fiction' means going on and on about something long after the reader has gotten the idea. ...Dan Ahearn

A denouement is not a complete or fully resolved ending but a satisfying closure to a story. [in French translates 'an untying, a relaxing of a knot of complexity'] Denouement is the rest that comes when all the disparate plot lines of a story, gnarled and taut, have been untied and an order has come about that brings a new moment of shalom.

swarmed by bats, abducted by aliens, sprayed with poison gas, had stuff dropped on our heads . . . ," said Coke. "And all of these things actually happened?" asked Dr. McDonald. "You didn't make any of it up?" "Yes, it all happened!" Pep shouted at him. "And a lot of other stuff, too. You could fill a—" "Book!" Dr. McDonald said, his eyes suddenly wide.

Fiction is what you get when you rub two things together," I said. Everybody laughed even though I didn't say anything funny.

story I ever heard!" Emily said. Then she started

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Despite the many cinematic qualities of life in America, this country is not a film. It lacks the real-time clarity and cohesive story-telling that makes a silver-screen epic so palatable. Instead, it is a muddy, confused, noisy, unwieldy thing that we are forced to come to grips with after the fact and often erroneously.

You have a person in a very tiny cell banging himself from one wall to the other and not being able to find any way out of it. What that person can do is talk. Is create a whole balloon of language which would carry him through the ceiling to somewhere else. This is the art. This is what a story is.

Fiction writers can't be trusted. They make things up.

Do not let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Theatre, when it is at its best, takes a lot of beating - the live experience and the shared collective experience of live storytelling is really special when it is good. Particularly here in New York because the audiences are amazing, very vocal and very engaged, and that makes theatre very exciting.

17 Christmases is a delightful children's book that I would highly recommend

When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.

Purpose isn't about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we'll call high-purpose environments.

Los braintrust no son divertidos. Son situaciones en las que se dice a los directores que los personajes carecen de alma, que la línea argumental es confusa y que los chistes son malos. Pero también sirven para hacer mejores las películas. «El braintrust es, con mucha diferencia, lo más importante que hacemos —afirma el presidente de Pixar, Ed Catmull—. Se basa en la total sinceridad de las críticas.»