Quotes About Storytelling

Le romancier est le seul menteur qui ne tait pas le fait qu'il ment.

We're going to survive—our songs, our stories. They'll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We'll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.

But when you write something down, you have to think it all the way through. Sometimes, I'm not even sure how I feel about something until I write a story about it. I figure it out while I'm writing the story.

Are you going to tell me what that was about?" Adam asked as we went back upstairs. "Sometime," I told him. "When we're telling ghost stories around a campfire, and I want to scare you.

Anna: "I thought Indians built fires with fiction." Charles: "I can do that, but I'd like to eat sometime in the next day or so. Sterno and Bic are much faster.

I sat down in the middle. "So," I said to Darryl, "do you think Korra is going to be as good an avatar as Aang?" "Who's Aang?" he asked. "You started him with Korra?" I accused Jesse. "That's not okay. It's like reading the last chapter of the book first.

You'd tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story.

Tell the story you want to tell, and let it be as long as it needs to be. Worry about marketing it later.

Patricia C. Wrede

I hate it when everyone is so noble and good in a story that you can't imagine it being true at all.

Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share.

The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn't a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer.

You have a story in there, Lucy," she said, touching my head. "Or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word," she whispered.

The way you turn a sad story around, you should be a comedian! You're the funniest person I know.

Réchauffe ta parole avant de la dire. Parle dans ton cœur. Savoir parler c'est savoir retenir sa parole. Parler vraiment c'est d'abord astiquer du silence. Le vrai silence est un endroit de La Parole. Écoute les vrais Conteurs.

A person is neither whole nor healthy without the memories of photo albums. They are the storybook of our lives. They provide a nostalgic escape from the tormented days of the present.

My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.

The 1:1:1 method can be summed up as starting a story as close to the end as possible. Most stories end before they get to the end, in terms of impact on the listener, their attention span, and the energy that you have to tell it.

every story has a purpose and point, and it's almost always about how they were made to feel.

Great storytelling and improv are all about setting the right framework with intimate details and telling the story that gets the right emotional payoffs from the crowd.

Effective storytelling is all about being as specific as you can and being as detailed as you can.

Remember that even though you are trying to tell a compelling story, you are not really an entertainer on a stage. Your primary goal is not to get people to applaud and think you're awesome—the goal is to make other people feel relaxed and happy, and to get good, satisfying conversation flowing. And that means, the sooner you can get off your podium, the better!

Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

The devil tells the best stories.