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.

When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams.

In my work, there is a lot of storytelling. The storytelling is not a new thing. Back in the [Howard] Thurston days, the [Harry] Houdini days, the [Harry] Blackstone days, it was stories, but the stories were, "We're going to the Egyptian temples, and we're going to vanish the Prince of Thebes," and, "On my last trip to the Orient ..."

All of the elements of the comic way tend to spread to others, insinuating joy where it was previously absent. Conversation has a way of leaping among persons, as it does at parties and celebratory gatherings. Storytelling always begets storytelling. It is difficult to watch others at play without wanting to join them. This is not only a human phenomenon, for researchers have consistently noted that animals at play are often imitated by other animals. So wherever it is possible to initiate a playful activity, it will have a good chance of replicating itself through other parts of the system.

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

What keeps faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humor. Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music, and books, raising kids-all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake.

I’ve always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There’s no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word.

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

I like being in real environments. I love being in the place that it's about - these sets and locations are characters in the movies. Can you imagine Breakfast at Tiffany's shot somewhere else? It's classic. Characters are part of storytelling; they're just as important as everything else.

I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.

Audiences will see what they want to see. Some will come out, hopefully enjoying two hours of action. Some people will find themselves gravitating towards the emotional dilemma that the characters find themselves in. Other people will see that there is some layer of subversions to the storytelling aspect of poking a finger of judgment at certain governments to the idea of foreign invasion, others maybe false pretenses.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it's not a game.

Humans only really learn from each other by storytelling. We didn't evolve to memorize things. We evolved to hear each other's stories and feel them in our heart. Your life is the most powerful story you can tell.

I want to do a stripped-down album. That style is actually where my heart is - storytelling and just letting the voice and the lyrics talk for themselves. I still want to write the perfect song and sing it in the most honest, undressed way. But I feel like I have to gather more experiences and more layers in my voice. I have to live more to be able to tell this tale. So I'm saving my folk record. I have a feeling nobody will understand it.

Most actors are drawn towards historical tellings because it's one of the most simple forms of storytelling.

Actors, we like stories, we like storytelling, we love being a part of the story, and if you give us a story that's interesting then we'll want to do it.

I'm an actor, so I'm interested in the pursuit of storytelling and character and challenging myself and expanding my craft. That's not something that ever ends, because as you grow as a person, so does your capacity to play different characters. New things come up, new things you want to explore and new stories you want tell about life and your knowledge of things. I don't think there's ever going to be that satisfaction of "and now, comfort."

I learned the power of storytelling and the responsibility that people with influence have to speak out

The way you write dialogue is the same whether you're writing for movies or TV or games. We use movie scriptwriting software to write the screenplays for our games, but naturally we have things in the script that you would never have in a movie script -- different branches and optional dialogue, for example. But still, when it comes to storytelling and dialogue, they are very much the same.

Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at.

Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you find compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record.

I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.

I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling.

My concern 99% is about the storytelling, the emotion and all this. I never think about the format of anything until way far in the process and when we arrive to the fabrication of the thing then we start to say, "Okay right, what is the best thing we can do." I choose the car before to choose the color.

My idea of storytelling is - I wouldn't say it's religious but I would say it's spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn't do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, 'Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.' And he said, 'Visions come to prepared spirits.' The way Billy Wilder put it was 'The muse has to know where to find you.'

Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ."...and ..."The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers.

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

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.

Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle.

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.

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

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

The incomparable James Walvin has done it again: he has crafted a beautifully written and deeply informed single volume history of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences on three continents. This book is full of fresh ideas and astounding detail; it is at once great storytelling, punctuated with real people and voices, and an unblinking analysis of numerous great questions and paradoxes about the power of slavery in creating the Atlantic world over four centuries.

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Acting was definitely half of what I loved about storytelling and about theater. So, when I get a chance to do a cameo in a show or do a movie, it's a lot of fun and it's always great stepping outside of yourself and either playing a bizarro version of yourself or playing a character.

Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity.