Quotes About Storytelling

To be honest, I found the 3D in 'Avatar' to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling. Technology aside, I wish 'Avatar' had been more original in its storytelling.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

I achieved perfection, my type of perfection - visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style.

I love all things Queen - their songs are epic storytelling.

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

I so love the animation process. Interesting, everything that I do in animation, the kind of crafting and skills of storytelling, totally work within the structure of the Disney nature films. In a weird way, I like to think that animation is like painting, and Disney nature is like sculpting. Animation you start with a blank canvas and you paint. With Disney nature, you start with a big block of imagery and you hone it down into your final story. Somewhere you end up with something kind of pretty to watch.

Storytelling is my passion, and it rises from a love of reading.

When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.

Some of the most successful, talented actresses of our generation, be it Julianne Moore, or Charlize Theron, or Charlotte Gainsbourg, or Isabella Rossellini, if you know your cinema history, have taken their clothes off. There's nothing wrong with nudity, per se, if it's part of the storytelling and it's eloquent and it says something about the raw humanity of the story.

I think the idea that television has evolved to this place of real thematic richness and the fact that you no longer have to get 10 million people to watch your show in order to propagate its survival are the best things that have ever happened to storytelling in this medium.

Writing a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what.

An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

I'm really inspired right now by a lot of the actors and actresses who are pursuing storytelling outside of just acting. They're writing, producing, they are creating their own material. That's really exciting to me. It feels like the possibilities are endless as far the things that you can make and even where they can be shown.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

We [Rodriguez and Frank Miller] wanted to take the movies and turn them into a graphic novel, so that people wouldn't even know what they were looking at. It's still visual storytelling, but it's approached completely different. The two mediums don't have to be separate mediums. They can be one and the same.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

With any sci-fi fantasy storytelling, you must have rules be very clear, otherwise you lose people, like 'OK, they can fly; now they can't fly.'

Yeah loads of bruises and welts, usually around the hip, arse, thigh region and elbows. Elbows got knocked up big time, but it was so much fun. I hadn't done a meaty action film in seven or eight years, so it was fun to explore that aspect of storytelling again.

I'm not a sci-fi lover; I wasn't from the start. So perhaps I miss that passion for other worlds, other dimensions, that sort of scope and that magnitude of storytelling; that's not my thing though I meet plenty of people whose thing it definitely is.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

Music's always been a big part of my life, but it kind of all happened in one big ball of storytelling rather than splitting acting and singing apart.

I became an actress because I discovered the world of the imagination when I was about 14 or so and the concept that you could engage in this amazing world of storytelling. I saw a production of Hamlet, and I didn't know Hamlet died in the end.

I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.

Even if I made pornography, the trauma would show, though. It will always be there because it's my verité. It's my kind of narrative, it's my kind of storytelling. It's not style; it's just there.

Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.

I look for really great characters. I say great because as long as they're really good, there's something you can do. And really good storytelling. And when people ask me what the story is, I say it's really several stories really. They're intermeshed.

One of the many lessons I hope I've learned is how much I underestimated people, their open-mindedness and their willingness to understand. I think, moreover, I underestimated the degree to which everyone has a story. So my advice, for whatever it's worth, is to trust readers, trust the truth and trust the power of storytelling.

I always say that, if you have great actors and great storytelling and great monsters, and you mix them together, nine times out of 10, it explodes in your face.

The kind of people that love 'The Rocketeer' are the kind of people that love good storytelling and innocence and a better world, so to speak, so they're almost always nice people to bump into.

'Nashville' songs and country music have always been about storytelling and about the heart and confessionals. They're monologues.

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?

I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting.

Back in the day, you'd walk down to a street corner and see some people making a story with a hat in front of them. It's ancient entertainment, ancient storytelling and oral history - now we're doing it on YouTube.

John Cassavetes' films have really altered the way I see film and acting and storytelling and emotion and love, so I see acting as this incredible revealing of human nature and this means of telling our story, sharing our voice with the world. That's what acting is for me. It allows for people to experience things through the character, through the story.

There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

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.

I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

Any platform that you use to tell stories helps you regardless of the medium regardless if they are bedtime stories that you tell your children or comics or film. Specifically what makes comics unique is that they are a storytelling device that forces you to think both visually and economically. Some might say you are limited by your imagination, but that is not true because someone has to draw it.

I grew up on movie sets, getting to see storytelling happen up close.

When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.

Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years.

There has to be a reason of whether you look right or you bring the emotional or intellectual baggage of what's required for the storytelling. For me, it's not something I've aspired to say, "I'm going to be working in Hollywood."

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.