Telling A Story Quotes & Sayings

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story. — John Waters

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind. — Matthew Weiner

Few novels truly deserve the description 'rollicking' in the way Mary Novik's Conceit does. A hearty, boiling stew of a novel, served up in rich old-fashioned story-telling. Novik lures her readers into the streets of a bawdy seventeenth-century London with a nudge and a wink and keeps them there with her infectious love of detail and character. A raunchy, hugely entertaining read that will leave you at once satiated and hungry for more. — Gail Anderson-Dargatz

There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer. — Cecelia Ahern

I always wanted to do an animated movie. I find it to be incredibly liberating as a way of telling a story. — Gore Verbinski

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

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated. — Susan Howatch

Just telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made. — Jean Dujardin

I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans. — Rian Johnson

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy. — Colum McCann

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person. — Laurie Graham

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.
What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude. — Peter Hoeg

When you write a story, you are telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story...Your stuff starts out being just for you...but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, as right as you can...it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, or criticise it. — Stephen King

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story. — Oprah Winfrey

Gee-word?"
"Gods. What were you doin' the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?"
"Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended. — Neil Gaiman

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am. — Paul Auster

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear. — Anne Enright

I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature you're recreating the experience of life, not just relaying a 'this happened, then that happened' kind of narrative. The specific details and layers of depth that make the world of the story - and what the character is experiencing in that world - as real as possible are elements I love as a reader and, consequently, elements I strive to use effectively as a writer. — Lara Campbell McGehee

The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories. — Donald Miller

I don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story
so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is. — Tama Janowitz

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

I think film, to me, as a director, is about telling a story. — Donnie Yen

For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. — Taylor Swift

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can. — Ira Glass

Aidan," ...
He held up his finger. "One second, babe. I gotta finish telling Pesh this story."
"But my water broke."
Without taking his eyes of Pesh, Aidan slid his glass of water over to her. "Here take mine."
If the situation hadn't been dire, Megan would have laughed at how oblivious Aidan was. Pesh leaned forward in his seat. "Um, Aidan, I think-"
He didn't get a chance to finish. Instead, water splashed across the side of Aidan's face. He shot out of his chair before whirling around to Emma. "What the hell, Em?"
"My. Water. Broke," she muttered through gritted teeth.
"Oh shit," he replied. — Katie Ashley

Telling a story about something you know nothing about is like starting a new job without the training. — Joshua Hartzell

People have suggested that perhaps we are too affluent to be telling this story, which is amazing to me because then I wonder what story I am allowed to tell. Having been working with the homeless for the past years, I noticed lots of things about them, but one thing I really noticed was that they were probably too busy just getting though the day to make a film about themselves. — Paul Bettany

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. — John Darnielle

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it. — Philip Reeve

I have always believed that directing a film is like telling a story. You have to tell it well so that it is appreciated. — Anupam Kher

People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things. — James Cameron

Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are. — John Patrick Shanley

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing. — Alexis Hall

I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me. — Jim Carrey

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell. — Jean-Paul Sartre

If eavesdropping on someone else's nightmares is supposed to make me feel better, I'd rather stay feeling like shit. I don't think telling them about my horror story would do me any good. And besides, I'm not even supposed to have a story to tell. - Nastya Kashnikov — Katja Millay

There is a kind of structure for a story that was peculiarly compelling for the radio. I thought I had invented it atom-by-atom sitting in an editing booth in Washington on M Street when I was in my 20s. Then I found out that it is one of the oldest forms of telling a story - it was the structure of a sermon. — Ira Glass

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. — Patrick Rothfuss

None of this seemed to be getting us much further so far as Widmerpool was concerned. I waited for development. General Conyers did not intend to be hurried. I suspected that he might regard this narrative he was unfolding in so leisurely a manner as the last good story of his life; one that he did not propose to squander in the telling. That was reasonable enough. — Anthony Powell

There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker. — Bradley Cooper

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse - there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention. — Jeanette Winterson

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story. — Ayn Rand

I'd say Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there's a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you're even telling a story. — Tim Story

I've been wanting for some time to find a way of stylizing cinema and trying to get closer to the emotional story I was telling and get rid of all the bumph that goes with it and allow the audience a more participatory experience. It was an attempt to do all of those things and to express the idea that all these people were just performing roles in their lives. — Joe Wright

It's my belief that all of the greatest tales ever told have been told in saloons. It was in such smoky, heathen-filled den of iniquity that I first heard the tale of the Bone Feud. As with all great tales, it was at its core one hundred percent true. In fact, much of it has long been a matter of historical record. But tales grow in the telling, and I therefore must apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, and beg your indulgence for any romanticized embellishments. I have decided to present the story here, just as it was told to me. I find it entirely too rich and too entertaining to alter, simply to curry favor with pedants and historians. — Wynne McLaughlin

There might be a proper age to know how to tell a story, but there's no proper age to start telling them. — Xavier Dolan

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. — Orhan Pamuk

I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema. — Lars Von Trier

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall. — John Berger

[On Jason Mashak's "I Was Trained to See Shadows", in his poetry book SALTY AS A LIP:] A nice bit of smooth, full-bodied, surreal story telling. I like it. — John Bennett

People need to understand that what happens in people's homes and behind closed doors, unless you were there, you really shouldn't make any analogy or any assumption, which writers do quite a bit. It's not something I ever for one second thought about. This is not my life story, and I've never told my life story, and I have no interest in telling my life story. — Charlize Theron

Whether your characters journey daily to a distant moon or just down the street to the corner bar, what matters to the reader is the singular event that distinguishes one such voyage from all the others and makes for a story worth telling. — Peter Selgin

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. — Wendell Berry

Life to me is a beautiful gift from from AdoShem that should not be wasted but shared with others. Including amazing revelations that are meant to be seen and meant to be told for such a time as this! — Sipporah Joseph

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling. — Andrea A. Lunsford

Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way. — Alister E. McGrath

As an actor, you tell part of a story. As a writer, you get more of telling that story. But as a director, they're seeing the world through your eyes. — Jonah Hill

When you write, you are telling a story ... to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself ... over and over again. — Kai Strand

[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck
'
[Opal] 'Was?'
[J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here. — Maria V. Snyder

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it. — Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it. — Nic Pizzolatto

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be. — Chuck Palahniuk

He was talking. I tried not to think of how he looked and instead of what he was telling me. Once I accomplished that, my brain couldn't get past the 'running' part.
"I don't run." I walked the mile run at school. True story.
I abhorred any kind of physical exercise. I wasn't good at it. I was skinny, but I was soft; had absolutely no muscle mass at all. That's the way I liked it. Who was he to try to change that, change me? I wouldn't let him. No way, no how.
One half of his mouth lifted. He seemed to be enjoying this a little too much. "You do now. You have to be fit, you have to be strong, Taryn, if you're to stand any chance of surviving this. Come on, we'll start with stretching."
He forced me to twist my body into unimaginable positions. I even had to touch my toes. The agony. Luke took pleasure from my pain; even laughing as I moaned and groaned through it all.
Then, the worst came about. He. Made. Me. Run. — Lindy Zart

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. — Jonathan Gottschall

There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts. — Chester Brown

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone(117). — J.M. Coetzee

Great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. — Gary Vaynerchuk

Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other. — Kathleen Norris

I say, as a singer grows older, his conception grows a little deeper, because he lives life and he understands what he is trying to say a little more. And I think this gives. If a singer tries to find out what's happening in life, it gives him a better insight on telling the story of the song he is trying to sing. — Sam Cooke

You can't plan for people to like your movies. I knew that people were not going to run in droves to the theater for the 'In the Valley of Elah.' I knew they might not want to see it, but I still had to the movie; I felt very strongly about it. Wanting to keep telling a good story is what you want to do, a compelling story. — Paul Haggis

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it. — Alistair MacLeod

I steer clear of telling. I can't come out with it; the outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know my story I talk freely about us ... but with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don't want to shock or make anyone distressed ... I try to keep a distance from those who are innocent of my reality. At best I am vague. I feel deceitful at times, but I can't just drop it on someone, I feel. It's too horrifying, too huge. — Sonali Deraniyagala

I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun. — Eric Idle

Nobody knows this crime territory better than Mark Langan. His authentic experience proves that he is an expert in telling a story worth listening to. --Alex Kava, NY Times Bestselling Crime Novelist — Mark Langan

Telling a story is like sowing a seed - you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies. — Laila Lalami

Writing a biography is a delicate - not a reckless - process, where the end result, if done properly, is simply the truth revealed. This delicate and intricate research process has never before been done for Bob Crane, a man with a story worth telling. — Carol M. Ford

My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story. — Philip Schultz

What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling. — Steve Erickson

If it takes you 500+ pages to tell a story, you are telling it wrong. — Cindy

He felt himself go cold as he suddenly realized what a dangerous game he was playing. So this is the difference between telling a story and being in one, he thought numbly, the fear. — Patrick Rothfuss

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen. — Dashiell Hammett

The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out. — Charlie Kaufman

We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches. — Tatiana Maslany

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night. — Carl Sandburg

My greatest strength as a writer is that I'm a storyteller. But, it was a long, hard struggle for me to make the transition from verbally telling stories to writing them. You'll note I don't dwell on descriptions in my writing, because I'm far more interested in telling the story. There are many better writers in this world, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone more passionate about stories than I am. — Debbie Macomber

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there. — Tom Stoppard

It's a lot more than clicking the shutter ... it's the ideas, it's the visual voice, it's the telling the story, it's kind of going beyond that initial thing that just means you happened to be there at the right time. — Ron Haviv

Nowadays, if somebody in America is feeling alone and wants to find a coming out story, they just search 'coming out,' and they'll find millions of first-person examples of people telling their story. — Tyler Oakley

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story. — Joshua Bell

That's the gift 'Precious' has given me. You really think you're telling a story about a fat black girl, and only fat black girls will understand it, and then you realize we're all Precious. — Lee Daniels

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian - the mythology resides deep in my bones - and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn't see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, "I am not a Christian," a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky. — Derrick Jensen

I want to make movies that people see. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do. — Alden Ehrenreich

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living. — William Throsby Bridges

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing. — Alan Lightman

Kvothe looked at Bast for a long moment. "Oh Bast," he said softly to his student. His smile was gentle and sad. "I know what sort of story I'm telling. This is no comedy."
"This is the end of the story, Bast. We all know that." Kvothe's voice was matter-of-fact, as casual as if he were describing yesterday's weather. "I have led an interesting life, and this reminiscence has a certain sweetness to it. But ... "
Kvothe drew a deep breath and let it out gently. " ... but this is not a dashing romance. This is no fable where folk come back from the dead. It's not a rousing epic meant to stir the blood. No.
We all know what kind of story this is. — Patrick Rothfuss

I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn't want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can't bear to go - to Amgash, Illinois - and I will not stay in a marriage when I don't want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think. — Elizabeth Strout

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters. — Roger Zelazny

Some stories are easy to follow, and easy to tell. There is an introduction, a twist, and a happily-ever-after. And when telling the story, everyone forgets those small details, like that one quiet morning when the two of you woke wake up with the sunrise and talked about cookies. Or that night when she had her period, and the cramps were killing her, and she just needed your hug and something warm. — Andrea Tomic

There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It's funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don't want a baby? Don't have one. I don't want to get married? I won't. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don't apologize. Don't explain. Don't ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it. — Shonda Rhimes

Don't spoil a good story by telling the truth. — Isabella Stewart Gardner