Quotes About Storytelling

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

there is something useful about the focal point of a story being an animal...I think it is very important right now, with regard to preservation of nature, to try to inhabit non-human perspectives and to, in some way, use fiction as the laboratory it should be. To explore things that are outside of the norms and not use it for the novel of manners or the thing that has been done before. (from Bloom Aftertalk interview)

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

My father, an enlightened spirit, believed in man. My grandfather, a fervent Hasid, believed in God. The one taught me to speak, the other to sing. Both loved stories. And when I tell mine, I hear their voices. Whispering from beyond the silenced storm, they are what links the survivor to their memory.

Sometimes Suralee and I walked up to the cemetery and lay on the graves. We liked to pretend we were letting dead people speak through us. "I was a hardworking man with a talent for whittling," Suralee might say from her

When a writer looked at an empty computer screen, what did she see? Tristan wondered. A movie screen ready to be lit with faces? A night sky with one small star blinking at the top, a universe ready to be written on? Endless possibilities. Love's endless twists and turns - and all love's impossibilities.

Until lions start writing down their own stories, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." —AFRICAN PROVERB

Totta puhuakseni en piittaa paljonkaan: hyvä tarina on hyvä tarina, tuli se mistä tahansa.

Chroniclers can edit names out as easily as visionaries can noise them abroad.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it.

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

A story that needs to have words said about it, is a story that does not contain all its own right words. -- Introduction to Varley's "Persistence Of Vision" collection

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is.

I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. I'm fire. I'm flood. I'm pestilence. I'm the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I'm the vein in the leaf. I'm the voice that tells no story.

But that's summer for you. Summer's like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn't just a merry tale. Because there's no merry tale without darkness.

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God. ...... a way to tell the story. It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played.

There's ways to survive these times, Doubleclick, and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.

There's ways to survive these times, Doubledick, and I think one way is the shape the telling takes