Storytelling Quotes

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenl...

Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history, people would gather around, whe...

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a ...

When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in whi...

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. ...

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the hist...

To hell with facts! We need stories!

The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, whe...

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

There is no greater power on this earth than story.

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shu...

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully ri...

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the...

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after...

[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a s...

If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you wer...

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out ...

Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.

Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.

The drinking dens are spilling outThere's staggering in the squareThere's lads and lasses falling ab...

I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, ...

Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories...

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feeli...

Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit.""Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, h...

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about pa...

Did you know that writing stories down kills them?Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff,...

So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how ...

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than y...

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.If they tell you that that is al...

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new...

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't ...

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are curre...

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I sus...

Every great love starts with a great story...

I am the unseen. For centuries I have been here, beneath this great city, this metropolis. I know yo...

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, i...

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories...

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyte...

If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling t...

It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent...

It will be worth it if I am remembered, if not flatteringly, then at least with some small amount of...

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That ...

Kvothe continued, smiling himself “I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume ...

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as stor...

No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what hap...

Hip-hop is storytelling.

As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethin...

Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are ...

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, w...

[I]f you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, ...

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth m...

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, ...

funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories.

You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother...

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, ...

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the stor...

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way";...

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say...

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) m...

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or fi...

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're he...

and their days make no story for they were good and joyful and without event

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, insertin...

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened...

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always ...

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are...

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what al...

A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and sto...

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is becaus...

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is bec...

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make i...

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The t...

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to...

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it become...

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that a...

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It ...

Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story.

He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron"...

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a ...

Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you yo...

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you...

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found som...

It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes an...

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photo...

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose...

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. ...

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do ...