Quotes About Storytelling

Everything, sooner or later, transforms into story.

One blink of a camera eye (can't quite put his finger on the name of the photographer) and that child dressed in leaves became all these things: sad, terrible, beautiful, funny, terrifying, dark, light, charming, fairystory, folkstory, truth.

There was once a child whose mother fell asleep. The end. Is that it? I said What else do you need to know? you said. Can't you tell me a little more about them? I said. (I was beginning to despair of your storytelling technique.)

the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience….Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we're doing, is not the only possibility. —Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006)

Storytelling can be more than a blog post, essay, or book. It can be an emoji, a meme, a selfie, or a tweet. It can become a movement for social change.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.

Hay muchas mentes imaginativas aquí, que en ausencia de hechos se inventarán una historia interesante para rellenar el vacío. De forma que nuestra fuerza es nuestra debilidad.

He thought for a while, and then said, "How do you fancy being my mute son, and I a . . . boot maker, maybe, from near Pellinor, seeking help for his son's affliction in Ettinor?" "Why not?" said Maerad, amused. "But do you know anything about boot-making?" "Ar, mistress," said Cadvan, winking in a rascally fashion. "You don't know what I know. My da was a cobbler, and his boots were much prized in Lirigon. And elsewhere, come to that.

Alison Goodman

Rather than following a [genealogical] 'line', I find myself drawn to all the people I encounter, including those who, only by the most obtuse reckoning, can be thought of as relatives. Every life deserves telling; none is without drama and change.

A good story was a form of communication, mind to mind, spirit to spirit. It sent life sparking from stranger to stranger, across space, decades and centuries. Human sympathy -- human attention -- had magic in it. Any real story fizzed with sympathy -- the writer's and reader's -- across time, over rows of typographical marks; those low boundary fences of the imagination, hurdled.

I am not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do. No mystique.

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Oh.' I shot upright. 'I was in Mongolia.' Note to self: learn to be a less extreme liar.

I am a filmmaker. That is all I've ever been. You know, Martin Scorsese makes films about the mob. And I make movies about food.

We said it really wasn't very late, that we were listening to him with growing interest. The bottle of bourbon was empty. I brought another, along with more ice, and we asked the Gaviero to continue his story. On summer nights in California, time stretches like an elastic, compliant material, perfect for hearing the confidences of someone who had a store of tales that could lead us from one marvel to another until dawn.

A story is a strong bridge across the night.

Cualquiera que viva un infierno durable o pajero puede, para enfrentarse a él, recurrir a la técnica mental más gratificantes de cuantas existen: contarse un cuento.

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.