Quotes About Storytelling

People would go from village to village with their books in a time of poverty and disease. They would get people around them, and for an hour, these storytellers would change people's lives. I'd always thought I was a reincarnation of that. That's who I want to be.

I wrote this 12-page 'Luke Cage' comic book for Marvel once, and I got to create a villain. His name was Lone Shark, so there was this running thing of whether it was spelled L-O-A-N or L-O-N-E. I like the idea of 'I'm a lone shark,' and then people are like, 'You are here to collect a debt?'

America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don't tell the story of the people who don't come out so successful, and we don't tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.

I find the trick to playing a villain is that you can't be bad for the sake of being bad. It has to be rooted in some sort of heartbreak.

What's really fun as the villain is working to get the audience to hate you.

'Dragon Ball''s villains were easy to draw: Piccolo, Freeza, Majin Boo.

We love a tale of heroes and villains and conflicts requiring a neat resolution.

Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have. People want to know what happens next, people hate the villains and love the lovers. It's good, fun TV. But I wouldn't call 'Downton' a soap opera as such.

It is in your DNA to love a good story. You know, neat tales with heroes and villains and conflicts to resolve. A good story pushes our buttons, is exciting and memorable.

I was always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There's no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.

I don't like villains who are just villains. People who are just there to be bad - ugh - so annoying.

When you think of a Vine video, it's like thinking about an experience you've had, which people can relate to.

I don't want to write about violence, and I don't want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it's cheap.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'

I've always listened to music while I write, but none of my work has been so directly impacted by a song as my new novel, 'So Cold the River,' for which the brilliant strings piece 'Short Trip Home,' composed by Edgar Meyer and featuring the incredible Joshua Bell on violin, inspired much of the story.

'Tell to Win' reveals the key elements that tellers of purposeful stories utilize to engage their listeners and turn them into viral advocates of the tellers' goals.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.

Virtual reality's been around for 40 years. People have been talking about storytelling in that world for all these years, and there have been experiments around of people trying to do that, and always excited about it.

At its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people, and breaking stories... and that requires virtually no technology.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue, and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.

What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.