Quotes About Storytelling

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

Because having your story told as a woman, as a person of color, as a lesbian, as a trans person, or as any member of any disenfranchised community, is sadly often still a radical idea. There is so much power in storytelling, and there is enormous power in inclusive storytelling, in inclusive representations.

First, the skill of storytelling helps to galvanize your team. Second, the discipline of storytelling requires leaders to be clear about their intentions and to prioritize what fits into the story versus secondary goals and issues. Third, there is possibly an artifact here - great storytellers can make their exploits and achievements sound very exciting and memorable. Successful leaders who are not good storytellers won't get the acknowledgement and appreciation they deserve.

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 ..."

Horror is great storytelling with scary elements on top of it, but if you don't have great storytelling, you can have all the scares in the world, but the movie won't work.

It's a fun thing to do, to put yourself in the service of something if you think you can add an interpretation. It's no different than any other storytelling.

Certainly the goal with any sort of storytelling is to have an impact, to touch on some reader's life. And in some cases, there may be stories that actually have a particular goal like that in mind. So yeah, that sort of thing does happen in comics, fairly regularly.

Electronic music lends itself to an abstract way of storytelling, so it keeps evolving. Theres a whole movement truly driving music further and there is no other music innovating as much as film music

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do.

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift.

Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.

I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.

The teacher always used me as an example to the class of good English and good storytelling because we all had to write the same stories. But she used to make me go out front - which I hated - and read my story to the class and I would get huge applause. Not because of who I was but because they truly enjoyed the stories I wrote.

I'm too much left brain. I very much have an emotional response to things; I love literature and films and storytelling. I need to nourish my right side, it doesn't get a lot of exercise.

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.

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

There are very few films that I've ever seen in my life that would be as silent or vacant as something like Jeremiah Johnson, and that to me was unbelievably captivating. You can see the same about [The Outlaw] Josey Wales: there's very little dialogue, and yet it contains such a deep, rich story. I've always thought of the western as American storytelling at its best.

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 think that's why it's difficult for women when they watch TV and we see one version of a woman who is attached at the hip to a guy, and that's kind of her whole thing. You kind of go, 'I don't relate to this, I don't feel this.' You know? Maybe somebody does, but not everyone. That's the other thing about storytelling, is you can't represent everybody. You know, you can't seek to do that. You have to tell stories that you're interested in talking about and characters that intrigue you.

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.

In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here.

The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today’s life.

Part of George R.R. Martins brilliant storytelling is taking the carpet out from under your feet.

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.

It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying

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.

It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

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.

What serialized cable dramas have given us is the opportunity to not simply tell the same story with slightly different words and different costumes, every week. people are really mining the ability of storytellers to tell a long form story that goes from A to Z, and to trust that an audience will follow that. If they miss it, over the course of the week, they can watch it online or buy the DVD. There are so many different ways of interacting with it. Storytelling in television is getting more complex and more nuanced.

Violence has been a part of storytelling forever and there's obviously a reason for it. Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones. I think there's something cathartic about having kids live through their fears through a book or any kind of story.

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours.

People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.

Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.

I've been making 16mm urban landscape films about San Francisco for many years. I choose different nonfiction themes to investigate and am generally interested in surfacing lesser-known histories. I like to investigate and illuminate these histories, combining them with my own unconventional storytelling style, which is generally a stream-of-consciousness voiceover involving a steady stream of personal reflections on pining over unavailable women.

As long as you still have one bridge left, nothing is lost. But from the moment that you cannot even understand the storytelling or the music of other cultures anymore, then we become strangers to each other and the situation will become very complicated.

I don't know when I made that active decision to be a writer or to try to write, but I know I always liked storytelling.

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

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

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

I think we're in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it's anybody's guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That's what's so exciting about the time we're in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told.

If you’re too rigid in your thinking you may miss some wonderful opportunities for storytelling.

I've always thought of the western as American storytelling at its best.

If a large number of people who are convinced alien abductions are real are hypnotising even larger numbers of others who suspect they might be, then it is likely there will be many alien abduction narratives flying around, as, indeed, there are. Of course, this is not proof they are not true, but it does provide a persuasive context for a simple psychosocial explanation. Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked.

I hope that as my career continues I get to create and work on more LGBT projects and bring LGBT storytelling into more mainstream media!

But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule.

Chad Michael Ward is a master of the storytelling craft. His imagery, both still and moving, reaches deep into the darkest corners of the mind, combining the macabre and the sensuous Revealing humanity's secret daydream atrocities. CMW taps into our most excitable of emotions with a blend of fear and human sexuality. Like an erotic car accident we can not look away from.