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.

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 it comes to storytelling, not taking risks is riskier than swinging for the fences. I have very simple ambitions when it comes to taking risks in storytelling and programming. I try very hard to avoid the expected.

Normally my process is to sit in a room and read a script and talk about it and ask questions and just create a dialogue. That goes all the way through shooting. All kinds of thoughts and ideas can find their way in there. As long as you're all on - We're just all trying to tell the story so my job as a director is just to find out what this film wants to be based on, it's just words on a page at some point but then it just needs to go to some level of believable storytelling. I'm discovering the film as I make it, to some degree.

There's not really genres as storytelling in Austria, unfortunately.

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.

Food was always a conduit in our family for storytelling, and it was a way for us to keep in touch and remember things. We're people that use food to keep each other together and to always cheer us up and make all of our days better.

Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.

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.

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time is really the stuff that interests me.

I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now.

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

I love storytelling. I love stories, and I love the way in which we connect through stories.

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.

First of all, there is absolutely an order that we have put together to create the maximum number of surprises, but that's just part of our storytelling.

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.

I praise CBS for taking a risk, which is always the price you pay for opportunity. This is not standard movie of the week storytelling. I think movies of the week have fallen into a niche and that isn't my niche

I'm really trying to focus on the storytelling, more so than ever before I think, partly because it makes for easier pages.

And it's only the beginning of a new era of exceptional Star Wars storytelling; next year we'll release our first standalone movie based on these characters, followed by Star Wars: Episode VIII in 2017, and we'll finish this trilogy with Episode IX in 2019.

I think a culture can really be elevated through the arts, and it's always a dream come true when I come across roles that enable me to fuse my love of storytelling with my passion for activism and raising social awareness.

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.

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

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.

What I had found after the success of Karate Kid II is that an actor basically needs to - a primary requirement on my part as how I view as actor is you have to create a background, you have to create a history of that character and place her into the script that you're reading and carry on forward because you don't know how the future unfolds. This is what storytelling is you place a certain set of circumstances with a certain set of characters and you see what unfolds after an event happens.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations.

I used to do a lot of story writing and storytelling coming up through grade school. By the time I got to college, I decided that I wanted to perform as well, and that's where I started.

We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Becauwse we really don't lov what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ... Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.

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.

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.

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.

My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation.

Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things.

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

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

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.

While the storytelling in games is getting so much better, you look at something like Grand Theft Auto V, which I thought was really beautifully written, it doesn't really need a movie because it is a movie. So I think you need a unique game - you either need an incredibly talented writer and director to come in and put together an amazing vision, or you need a game like Metal Gear, which is very cinematic, has a huge amount of history behind it, but whose cinematic experience is very different from what you'd get in a theater.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

There's a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need," Morrie said. "You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don't need the latest sports car, you don't need the biggest house. The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?...Offering others what you have to give...I don't mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It's not so hard.

You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there.

I was desperately unhappy with it [Blade Runner]. I was compelled by contract to record five or six different versions of the narration, each of which was found wanting on a storytelling basis. The final version was something that I was completely unhappy with. The movie obviously has a very strong following, but it could have been more than a cult picture.

Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.

I do like 'Munich'.It's a really wonderful film. I mean, there's 'Schindler's List', there's 'Saving Private Ryan'. But 'Munich' - of all the other films, Munich would be the one that's really, really amazing storytelling.

Every bit as visceral and hypnotic as its award-winning predecessor, On the Ropes is a tour-de-force of fluid, yet detailed storytelling.