A Good Storyteller Quotes & Sayings

I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story. — David Eddings

He was a good storyteller, but he told the kind of stories that made children run away from the village and adults look for a length of rope and some soap. — Sorin Suciu

When you're just starting out, and someone you think is a real storyteller says something good about you, that helps. — John Hawkes

Most of all, I love being a storyteller. And yes, I want to make a good living, but I'm not always driven by the best commercial sense. — Bruce Coville

To be a good storyteller one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. I have noticed that the best of the traditional storytellers whom I have heard have been those who live close to the heart of things-to the earth, the sea, wind and weather. They have been those who knew solitude, silence. They have been given unbroken time in which to feel deeply, to reach constantly for understanding. They have come to know the power of the spoken word. These storytellers have been sailors and peasants, wanderers and fisherman. — Ruth Sawyer

good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover. If this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the development of modern embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many. — Yuval Noah Harari

I'm not a good storyteller. I always think I'm going to get interrupted, or something's going to get edited. I think that comes from being in a large family, so you have to get your story in really quick or someone cuts you off. — Amy Sedaris

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it. — Ashwin Sanghi

I'm not a good storyteller - I much prefer to be with people who are chatty, to have the luxury of listening. — Conor McPherson

I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.' — James Patterson

A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven't. — Irvin S. Cobb

This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself. — Kurt Vonnegut

You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't. — Sandra Dallas

I'm a good storyteller. — Sophie Marceau

One of the things you learn in football is that you're only as good as your last outing. I don't like to reflect on what we've done in the past. I'm not a very good storyteller, for one thing. I'd disappoint you. When it's time, I'll talk about the good old days. But it's a sign of old age, reveling in the past. — Chuck Noll

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that makes you so mad - you can create an entire scenario around that. — Taylor Swift

I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983. — Deborah Harkness

Oh, I almost forgot. In case that anyone besides big-headed Near or the deluded murderer is reading these notes, then I shall at least perform the basic courtesy of introducing myself, here at the end of the prologue, I am your narrator, your navigator, your storyteller. For anyone else but those two, my identity may be of no interest to you, but I am the world's runner-up, the best dresser that died like a dog, Mihael Keehl. I once called myself Mello and was addressed by that name, but that was a long time ago.
Good memories and nightmares. — NisiOisiN

I firmly believe that a good storyteller's education never ends, because to tell stories perfectly you have to know everything about everything. Naturally, none of us actually achieve such complete knowledge - but we should live as if we were trying to do so. You can't afford to close off any area of inquiry. — Orson Scott Card

He wrote as if he were the reader. It was also how he kept his writing from becoming too cute, which is to say, about him not the subject. Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who let his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible. — Richard Castle

A good storyteller can hold everybody captive without the special effects of Hollywood. — Phil Keoghan

A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner — Michael Chabon

When you're a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you're telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn't like that story, it doesn't feel good. — Carlton Cuse

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller. — B. D. Wong

To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller. — Daryl Hall

From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me. — Athol Fugard

If you look at the least effective of the 'Twilight' movies, it was when they brought in an action-movie director instead of a director who was really a good storyteller. And you can tell the difference. — Mark Waters

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and just settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else - the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well - we certainly write more easily. — Julia Cameron

I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I'm a manipulator as well. — Wilbur Smith

I see myself as a storyteller, I don't mind if the story is fact or fiction, if it's a good story I'd like to tell it. — Leanne Pooley

I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller,
the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered-
as a storyteller. A good storyteller. — Louis L'Amour

Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller. — Kevin Spacey

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you're a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you're a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie. — Jean Rouch

Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great. — Bryan Way

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest. — Walter Benjamin

A good storyteller never lets the facts get in the way. — Dave Allen

But Tony was a storyteller, and he knew that if you looked at any narrative closely enough you could trace the unraveling back and back and back - right to the very beginning, if the story was good enough. — Nick Hornby

Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots. — John Crowley

~I am neither an author nor a writer. I am a storyteller with good grammar.~ — Darke Conteur

Being a talented artist is good, it's nice, but it's not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist. — Bill Plympton

A thrilling story can be dull if told badly, but even the most mundane event can be elevated into a tale of epic scale by a good storyteller. — Johnny Rich

I've read a hundred fantastic scripts that didn't pan out as films, and I completely put that on the directors. I've also read some mediocre scripts that have ended up being amazing, and I credit that to the directors. They're the storytellers. If you don't have a good storyteller, you really have nothing. — Chris Evans

Sometimes not honoring your character makes for really good television, but that also can really upset fans. You have to turn things upside sometimes. As a storyteller, you have to know that sometimes you're going to let your fans and the audience down because you have to do your part in servicing the story. — Azita Ghanizada

A good story needs only a good storyteller. — Richard Bausch

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster. — Chuck Wendig

Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter
my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments. — Dorothy Allison

A good storyteller minces words to entertain or inspire the audience. The politicians and religious leaders do much the same, but for a different purpose - to turn otherwise normal people to nutcases. — Vinko Vrbanic

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward. — Maria Semple

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller. — Garth Stein

Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book. — Ashwin Sanghi