Quotes About Storytelling

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

They will do their best to invalidate your story. If that doesn't work, they will tell you not to tell your story.

Our role as historians is to ask, "What would these stories have conveyed to the people who first heard them?" Our role as readers is also to ask, "What do these stories mean to me, and what have they meant to my community and to my tradition over time and across the globe?

To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.

Each child's story is worthy of telling. There shouldn't be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.

Be honest about what you see, get out of the way and let the story reveal itself

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.

It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.

Telling a story to go with the meal is de rigueur, cher, it makes the food more memorable, and both meal and story get better when you sip that ice-cold Dixie beer.

I am constantly telling my own story to myself, and these days that's about all the narrative flow I can handle.

As in any proper fairy tale, there's a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines.

I never do a whole new set of new material. I do one new joke at a time, and I wedge it in between two good jokes. Or if it's a long story, I don't do it in L.A. or New York; I do it in Kansas and Omaha, all these places I'm going this weekend.

It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.

It was when I got to NXT with Dusty Rhodes, being the creative force he was, and told us to bring our most creative side every single week. One of those weeks, I brought the guitar and started telling stories while I played, and it just evolved from there.

On TV, you never know where it's going. They may even lie to you about where it's going. You never really know because the scripts come in every couple of weeks or so.

I had to stop traveling alone because I missed so many planes. When somebody runs up to you in the airport and begins to tell you their life story, you can't say, 'Excuse me, boo,' as they're weeping on your bosom.

I befriended a homeless man five years ago, bought him a new set of teeth, helped him get his life on track. A writer for 'Elle' spent two hours talking to this guy and discarded almost everything he said. When the story came out, we both were weeping while reading it on the street!

Research can be a boon to a novelist - there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer's philosophy - or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.

I think there's something really thrilling to having to get people laughing about something, and then, when you have them in that comfort space, you can drop the weight into the texture of the story.

The bad guy in any good storytelling is always, in some weird way, a mirror for your hero's journey and for the challenges that they are facing and is some weird physical externalization of that fear that the character is holding onto and has to overcome.

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.

That's kind of the weird thing that M. Night Shyamalan has sort of unleashed upon the world is this need for every movie to have these ridiculous endings.

Here's the weird thing about me. I was never one to tell you stories about me. I was always the guy who others told stories about. I was like that up until I was 35 years old. And then I started telling stories about me onstage.