Shot Stories Quotes & Sayings

Those that aspire to raise their head above the crowd are most likely to have it shot off. — Leif Herrgesell

When you move the camera, or you do a shot like the crane down (in Shawshank) with them standing on the edge of the roof, then it's got to mean something. You've got to know why you're doing it; it's got to be for a reason within the story, and to further the story. — Roger Deakins

I remember when I was doing Mermaids [1990], I was 16 and they gave me a B12 shot once. My parents weren't there, and when they did come, they freaked out. They were terrified, because of the Judy Garland stories. I know it's just vitamin B, but it did give you a boost. — Winona Ryder

The philosophy I always have is what's the sentence that would tell me about each shot. If I can't read why the shot's there, what is the story trying to say? — Jennifer Lee

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. — Walter Benjamin

I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories. — Gerhard Richter

There is only one Steve Jobs, but if you want a shot at being the next Steve Jobs, learn to communicate using stories, demos, and pictures. — Guy Kawasaki

He makes up the most remarkable yarns - and then his mother shuts him up in the closet for telling stories. And he sits down and makes up another one, and has it ready to relate to her when she lets him out. He had one for me when he came down tonight. 'Uncle Jim,' says he, solemn as a tombstone, 'I had a 'venture in the Glen today.' 'Yes, what was it?' says I, expecting something quite startling, but no-wise prepared for what I really got. 'I met a wolf in th street,' says he, 'a 'normous wolf with a big red mouf and awful long teeth, Uncle Jim.' 'I didn't know there was any wolves at the Glen,' says I. 'Oh, he comed there from far, far away,' says Joe, 'and I fought he was going to eat me up, Uncle Jim.' 'Were you scared?' says I. 'No, 'cause I had a gun,' says Joe, 'and I shot the wolf dead, Uncle Jim - solid dead - and then he went up to heaven and bit God,' says he. — L.M. Montgomery

A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing. — Christopher Nolan

A book is simply a snap shot of the full story. — Erica Goros

We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there's a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.
Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not.
Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.
If you believe in it, do it. If there's a comic or a project you've always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you'll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do. — Neil Gaiman

Telling the story with only a few shots, I love that style. It makes you feel like you're part of the action, part of the story. It reminds me of the theater, where one act is basically like one long shot. It almost makes you forget that you're seeing a movie. — Vilmos Zsigmond

They were going to the house of a man who was shot dead. What was with all the exuberance? But maybe that was the only way you could move forward after mindlessly recording stories of brutality and violence for days on end? Maybe detachment was the only way. But if you could not be passionate about your job, what was the point in doing it? — Shweta Ganesh Kumar

I'm a New Zealand actor, and I really want to be doing our stuff here, and our stuff includes plays from overseas. In terms of survival, maybe I should have taken a shot elsewhere at some point, but it gets back to the same theme - we should have our own people telling our own stories. — Peter Hambleton

Jimi on the box, thirty stories up, everything immediate, yet distanced. Jimi's chords locked in aerial dogfights, gliding, riding, sliding, hiding, belligerent bursts, hallucinogenic, a head-warping face-wiping mind melt, chords live dive bombers screaming in for the kill, scintillating, serrated chords shot through with arc-light shrieks of staccato mayhem, as immediate and horrific as the firefight racketing away this very second below our red and puffy eyes; chords that hang in the air like the retinal reflection of an eerie afterburn, the stars displaced and the smell of a world that burned. Overhead, night birds flying, Huey, Apache, Chinook, whooshing with murderous potential. And over everything - every apocalyptic bang, boom, and rattle - Jimi, bleating like Braxton and bonding with the bombast. — Roger Steffens

You've all heard stories about how these Seguleh have never been beaten. How they've slaughtered everyone who's ever faced them. Well look around... We're still here! And now - now they're offering you a choice! All you've to do is drop your weapons and surrender. That's all. But if you do that I can promise you one thing ... you ain't gonna have another shot at the bastards! So what's going to be? Hey? What's your answer?
Silence. Aragan glared right and left, his heart hammering, gulping breaths. Then at the far end of the line a hulking Dal Honese trooper drew his blade, held it out saluting, and bashed it to his shield twice. Hands went to sword-grips all up and down the lines. Swords hissed, drawing to clash in a great thunderous roar agains shields, once, twice, then extending in the formal salute.
There's your Malazan answer — Ian C. Esslemont

But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence. — JY Yang

I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.
Sometimes I just survive.
But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.
That's when the stories show up in me.
They find me all the time.
They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.
The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.
Maybe they all just merge into one.
We'll see, I guess.
I'll let you know when I decide. — Markus Zusak

Everything has already been done. every story has been told every scene has been shot. it's our job to do it one better. — Stanley Kubrick

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. — Susan Sontag

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they're being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I'm black. I tell them, 'Don't stop now. If I shot somebody you'd mention it.' — Colin Powell

Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes. — William Safire

I shot many scenes of Hamburg, albums full of postcard motifs, and I discarded almost all of them. I ride my bike through Hamburg every day. I go shopping here, I go to the doctor - and yet I no longer have the eye for telling stories about this damn city, even though I love it. — Fatih Akin

I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,' which contains 100 stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write. — Jhumpa Lahiri

It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the "picture" end only with the paper. This method may be suitable for for photographs; but it is altogether inappropriate for the pictures that illustrate or are inspired by fairy-stories. An enchanted forest requires a margin, even an elaborate border. To print it coterminous with the page, like a "shot" of the Rockies in Picture Post, as if it were indeed a "snap" of fairyland or a "sketch by our artist on the spot", is a folly and an abuse. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Being an African filmmaker, Africa is what's important for me. If I were to shot a film in France or elsewhere it would only be because the story that was being told was something that concerned me, and that really called me or needed to be shown on the screen. — Abderrahmane Sissako

People who think achieving success is a linear A-to-Z process, a straight shot to the top, simply aren't in touch with reality. There are very few bona fide overnight success stories. It just doesn't work that way. Success appears to happen overnight because we all see stories in newspapers and on TV about previously unknown people who have suddenly become famous. But consider a sequoia tree that has been growing for several hundred years. Just because a television crew one day decides to do a story about that tree
doesn't mean it didn't exist before. — Donald Trump

The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [ ... ]. — Gilles Deleuze

Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story. — Robin Hobb

The crowd started cheering as soon as they seen him, he was one of them, a local lad from Lancashire. In the first round, I tried to put him away but my punches had nothing in them, I might as well as been hitting thin air. It was then that I knew I had to really dig deep if I wanted to hear the final bell; I threw a clever little corkscrew right. A great shot, but ineffective unless it hits with some vigour, which it didn't! — Stephen Richards

I really wanted to work with Luc Besson. I'm a big fan of his. Did you ever see 'The Professional.' It was very violent. But a fabulous story, a fabulous movie, very well done. So that and two or three other projects of his that I've seen, I just thought if I had a shot to work with him I wanted to do it. — Morgan Freeman

JAMIE'S SONG 'KILL ME':

In the darkness of the night,
you come to me to fight.
You tell me stories of your life,
and make me miss you all the while.

I used to crave you but now I find,
I'm not living, I'm blind.
And the daylight has combined,
with the hollow that's inside.

This black space that's in me,
is all you've left me to feel.
The love you took from me,
was all I had, is all I feel.
But now there's nothing left of me.

You should've killed me,
or buried me alive.
You could've shot me,
even stabbed me with a knife.

I wish you'd killed me;
I wish you'd kill me instead. — Neha Yazmin

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra. — Neil Gaiman

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader. — David Gerrold

Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people ... The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire ... but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. — Diane Setterfield

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering. — Erin Gruwell

War didn't scare me. I just didn't want to go all the way-hell over there to fight one. I had a reputation after that
I pretended I shot myself by accident, but everyone knew. I never did lose that reputation, but now most everyone is dead, and y'all ain't got any stories from them, so you have to believe mine by default: They were cowards, too. Everyone is. — John Green

I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave abominably, and with such abominable results. They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. — Kurt Vonnegut

Each story has a different approach for me and I try to work with lighting that will tell you visually the story better than if it was shot in available light. — Vilmos Zsigmond