top of page
.png){kind=small}
Storytelling Quotes
"Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters."
36
"I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don't see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn't any necessary conflict between good history and good drama."
35
"Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning."
34
"But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end."
34
"We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write."
34
"Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many."
33
"But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger."
33
"Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone's story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world."
31
"It had always fascinated him that she'd consumed so many words, that her head was full of stories, told a thousand different ways."
31
"Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good."
29
"Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind."
29
"Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it."
28
"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."
28
"The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."
27
"A story has value whether it's true or not."
27
"Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being."
26
"As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches ."
25
"If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."
24
"That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."
24
"But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you."
23
"A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law."
23
"Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!"
23
"We are all the construction of a story and it is only at the end that we can assess the value of the plot. ['Everybody his story']"
22
"Pilon complained, "It is not a good story. There are too many meanings and too many lessons in it. Some of those lessons are opposite. There is not a story to take into your head. It proves nothing.""I like it" said Pablo. "I like it because it hasn't any meaning you can see, and still it does seem to mean something, I can't tell what."
21
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."
21
"Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story."
21
"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."
21
"We owe it to each other to tell stories."
21
"Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' - 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old - it is the new combinations that make them new."
20
"I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I'm writing it down. It's not true."
20
"The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained."
20
"The making of stories is only one part of my craft -mainly, I'm a heart whisperer..."
20
"An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings."
19
"The world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind."
19
"I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller."
19
"What you should actually be trying to figure out is how to tell your story. The one that is every bit as unique to you as your fingerprints.This is the truly amazing feat because you are literally the only person capable of doing that. Only you know all the parts to your story and only you can pass it on for others to hear if you choose to."
18
"We were made to be distracted by life, by story."
18
"Stories are a communal currency of humanity."
18
"Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded."
18
"It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?"
18
"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule-a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."
18
"If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me."
18
"As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections."
18
"Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms-of life, of love, of knowledge-has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath."
17
"The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another."
17
"A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving."
17
"There are only three possible endings -aren't there? - to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that."
17
"And now you'll be telling storiesof my coming backand they won't be false, and they won't be truebut they'll be real."
17
bottom of page