Quotes About Storytelling

I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content, which I enjoy doing. What I really love doing is mixing that with humor.

It seems to me that romantic comedies used to be about falling in love, but in recent years they've really become just comedies where the love story is only there as a spine to hang the jokes on.

Having said that, the enchanted wanderer seemed to feel prophetic inspiration coming upon him anew and lapsed into quiet concentration, which none of his interlocutors ventured to interrupt with any new question. And what more could they have asked him? He had divulged the story of his past with all the candor of his simple soul, and his predictions remained in the hands of Him who conceals their destinies from the wise and prudent and only sometimes reveals them unto babes.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

In the absence of facts, we tell ourselves stories.

In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble?

But our God is good for a great story—funny stories that are often birthed in tragedy and hardship!

This isn't a tragedy. It's just non-fiction.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.

Vera said: "Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?" So I told her why. Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Because there is a need to hear one story and to tell another.

Good fiction creates its own reality.

While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Je me rappelle encore avec quelle émotion le vieillard que j'étais à l'âge de neuf ans, de retour du camp, reçut au jour solennel de son anniversaire un recueil de contes roumains. En cet après-midi d'été 1945, dans le silence de la pièce, seul dans l'univers, je découvrais la langue fascinante, magnétique, miraculeuse, d'un conteur de génie. (p. 9)

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

Stories are wonderful, enjoyable, and scrumptious things. In the old days, they were served on thin plates called pages. You ate them with your eyes. And they didn't go down to your tummy, like normal food. No, they went into a dream machine inside your head.

There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands.

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had only been done thirty or forty times before.

Like all good works of fiction, it lies like the truth.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.