Quotes About Storytelling

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

Much more than memoir; it's history.

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

I'm very at home working with mythology.

Ever since I was younger, I would make table reads at home where I would give fake interviews.

I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Honesty is not necessarily interesting. I don't want to hear about your dreams or your acid trips, probably unless you make them really interesting.

An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the honesty of the story.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I hope before I am getting too old and when my mind is still functioning, I can tell some better stories.

I don't think I'm a total pessimist, so I think you can find hope in all my films.

Humanity lives in its fiction.

A movie is about human beings, about humanity.

Good storytelling is humanity's great connector, and it just might keep the world from eating itself.

Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do.