Quotes About Story

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

Eva is a story of repetition. It is a story where our protagonist faces the same situation many times over and determinedly picks himself back up again. It is a story of the will to move forward, even if only a little. It is a story of the resolve to want to be together, even though it is frightening to have contact with others and endure ambiguous loneliness. I would be most gratified if you found enjoyment in these four parts as it takes the same story and metamorphoses it into something different.

A 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower in Chicago [and] a 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower directly across the street.

Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.

I get up in front of a bunch of kids and say 'Hey, I'm gonna tell you a new story. Who wants to be in a new story?' Well some kid always sticks up their hand and that gives me a name, but it doesn't give me a story. I just say whatever comes to my mind and usually it's not that good. Every once in a while, however, I say something that turns into a really good story.

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.

The format of the book was the idea of my wonderful editor, Stephen Segal. Stephen and I had worked together before, on projects for the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and when he got the idea for an accordion-style book, he called and asked if I could write the story for it. I told him that I would love to try! And I knew it had to be a love story, because that's the sort of story you really want to hear from both perspectives. I mean, imagine if Pride and Prejudice were told from Darcy's perspective as well as Elizabeth's. It would be quite a different story!

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

Animation story boarding works differently than live action story boarding. The story crew along with a writer really does shape and create the film - the world and it's characters. We meet almost every day and brainstorm the plot of the film. It's a highly collaborative process - and we continue to improve the story until we literally run out of time.

The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.

When I get to tell a story through music videos or TV, it's all about finding the story that I want to tell, so I'm definitely open to acting roles, it just depends on the story.

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

Lawrence Hill, a cultural and spiritual descendant of West African griots, has used his vast storytelling talents to create an epic story that spans three continents. The Book of Negroes recites the pain, misery and liberation of one African woman, Aminata Diallo, who was stolen from her homeland and sold into American slavery. Through Aminata, Hill narrates the terrifying story of slavery and puts at the centre a female experience of the African Diaspora. I wept upon reading this story. The Book of Negroes is courageous, breathtaking, simply brilliant.

The seminal elements of what makes a story great - challenge, struggle, resolution - are the same whether we're talking about story content for a movie such as 'Rain Man,' or telling a purposeful story to forge new business relationships or conclude a fruitful transaction, such as acquiring an NBA franchise.

Through centuries of struggle, Jews across the world have been witnesses not only against the crimes of men, but for faith in God and God alone. Theirs is a story of defiance and oppression, and patience in tribulation reaching back to the exodus and their exile. That story continued in the founding of the state of Israel. That story continues in the defense of the state of Israel.

The most questionable thing I did was make Superman a government agent. If this had been a Superman story, I'd never have done that - and I know that, because I have a Superman story I want to tell someday. In this story, Batman was the hero, so the world was built around him.

I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

Staying relevant is key. When you're telling your story, you better have a modern story to tell. If I was still saying the same story I was saying 10 years ago, it would not be that interesting.

When I was eight years old, I played a story game with my younger brother and sister to help them fall asleep. The 'word-story game' was where they would choose a word and I would create a story. Acting and directing are similar to this game, where I am given the words then I fill in the life of the characters.

Artists are not helper monkeys; they’re not in it to visualize 'your' story, because it stopped being 'your' story the moment you engaged in a collaborative medium. From here on in, it’s also the artist’s story, and if you’re working with an illustrator who’s any good at all, you as a writer have to tamp down any control-freak tendencies you suffer under and relax into the process.

My job is to help the functioning of the story, not to draw attention to myself, but to make my characters function within the story, to work for the benefit of the story, to make the whole thing work.

My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.

It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

Matthew loved the magi. He gave their story more square inches of text than he gave the narrative of the birth of Jesus. He never mentions the shepherds or the manger, but he didn't want us to miss the star and the seekers. It's easy to see why. Their story is our story.

I love theater, a performance and designing a visual spectacle. It is like creating a composition with clothes, which have to fit the psychology as well as the body of characters. The performance is frozen in time, the clothes have to stay reliable and help to define the story. Fashion can be much more abstract. It needs no story because the woman is the story. She supplies the text and content. Fashion for retail is the opposite of frozen, it has to change and morph constantly to stay relevant - to be the "fashion.".

A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do. When I tell the story of Cinderella, the sprite does not want me to make it into an allegory of the fall of communism. The sprite would be unhappy if I did that.

There's actually a big difference between story and character. A great story doesn't make a great movie. A great script, which defines its moments and characters can become a great movie. You can make a movie that makes a lot of money and it may or may not have great story or great characters.

With my two brothers, Jean-Marie and Joel, I wrote a two-page story and wanted to make some kind of movie. We met a French production company, called Why Not?, and the first name we put on the list was Ken Loach. It was a dream for all of us. So, we tried and we met Ken and Paul Laverty, his writer, and they read the two pages and were inspired by that to do something. Paul had the freedom to do his own story - and he wrote his own story, which is better than the one we'd written.

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.

The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

I always believe that every song tells a story, so the last thing I want to do is edit out like the meat of the story. I would pick songs based off a), whether I felt like I could do anything with them, and b) whether I felt like I could keep the story intact. And then you sit in with one of the piano players and one of the vocal coaches and kind of work out your arrangements that way.

Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than the story. The words sit there on the page like coins, with their own opacity, as though they're there for their own sake. "A man goes into a phone booth, stirring coins in his palm." "Stirring" is such an obviously selected word. You can feel the writer looking for the word as he sat at the typewriter.

I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it's different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.

For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new.

The fundamental difference between the mystery story and the ghost story is the fact that a mystery demands a solution for its effectiveness; a ghost story is necessarily unsolvable; the reader must be willing to accept the fact that nothing is proved.

When you change your NOW story, you instantly change your past story and your future story.

I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent.

There are three things that are important for a film. Number one is story, number two is story, number three is story. Good actors can save a bad script and make it bearable, but good actors can't make a bad script good - they can just make it bearable.

Every pellet has a story all its own. Every pellet has a story all its own. With its fur and teeth and bones And one or two stones, Every pellet has a story all its own. We shall dissect every pellet with glee. Perhaps we'll find a rodents knee. And never shall we tire In the sacred task that we conspire, No do our work less perfectly And those bright flecks at the core, Which makes our hearts soar, Shall forever remain the deepest mystery. - The owlets in the Pelletorium at St. Aegolius

The story of the Zen Master whose only response was always "Is that so?" shows the good that comes through inner nonresistance to events, that is to say, being at one with what happens. The story of the man whose comment was invariably a laconic "Maybe" illustrates the wisdom of nonjudgment, and the story of the ring points to the fact of impermanence which, when recognized, leads to nonattachment. Nonresistance, nonjudgement, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

I think the key for us is really letting the stories we feel are best told to kind of dictate where we go. When we find a story we really believe is one that should be told, how do we best tell it and you know what do we need to tell that story most effectively? I think to the good, the universe is such that there are a lot of options, there a lot of opportunities. So that's kind of what's guiding us.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

I come from the best era of film I believe; when people were taking chances on films. It's time for us to bring more truth to the story and not necessarily carry a torch for every Black person in America; just tell a story, and a good one too.

I read a story about some old opera singer once, and when a guy asked her to marry him, she took him backstage after she had sung a real triumph, with all the people calling for her, asked, 'Do you think you could give me that?' That story hit me right, man. I know no guy ever made me feel as good as an audience. I'm really far into this now, really committed. Like, I don't think I'd go off the road for long now, for life with a guy no matter how good. Yeah, it's the truth. Scary thing to say though, isn't it?

The mastery of the turn is the story of how aviation became practical as a means of transportation. It is the story of how the world became small.