Selected storytelling quotes

1. Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

2. In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

3. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

4. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

5. Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

6. Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

7. Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

8. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?

9. I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

10. Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

11. What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way.

12. Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.

13. Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

14. I have always had such sincere love for truth, that I have often begun by telling stories for the purpose of getting truth to enter the heads of those who could not appreciate its charms.

15. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

16. In Germany I ingested the entire contents of the hotel mini-bar before a show and stuck my fingers in this guy's nostrils because I thought they would fit.

17. There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

18. Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

19. I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.

20. And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale.

21. To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

22. The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

23. The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

24. Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. 'Brick' was a good script just to read. It was like, 'Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.' A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In 'Brick,' the world is born from the words.

25. Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.

26. Veronica solves little puzzles because she, like all of us, cannot unravel the bigger ones.

27. People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

28. A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.

29. If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

30. After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

31. The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

32. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

33. An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

34. Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

35. See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older.

36. Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

37. Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.

38. If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

39. The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

40. Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

41. I take great pride in the artistic development of cartoons. Our characters are made to go through emotions which a few short years ago would have seemed impossible to secure with a cartoon character. Some of the action produced in the finished cartoon of today is more graceful than anything possible for a human to do.

42. I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

43. There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

44. Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that - no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.

45. With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

46. For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility. (1461b11)

47. I leave out the parts that people skip.

48. I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.

49. If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is? (Ibid.)

50. And now you know -- the rest of the story.

51. Through all the drama-whether damned or not- Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.

52. The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.

53. Life doesn't happen in chapters- at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn't write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children's books ('I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep') but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.

54. The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

55. One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his 'imagination' upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind 'teased' by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.

56. The Rock's gonna take your monkey ass down to the corner of Know Your Role Boulevard, turn right on Jabroni Drive...AND CHECK YOUR CANDY-ASS INTO THE SMACKDOWN HOTEL!

57. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

58. If we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true. No, we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives. If they would only believe us we would tell them that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should being by telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told to compose for them in a similar spirit.

59. He holds him with his glittering eye - The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years child: The Mariner hath his will.

60. Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.

61. 'Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama?' That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there ... it's not necessary to answer the question, 'Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?' before you decide to listen to it and like it or not.

62. The characteristic which struck me most was his superabundance of common sense. His power of managing men, of deciding and avoiding difficult questions, surpassed that of any man I ever met. A keen insight of human nature had been cultivated by the trials and struggles of his early life. He knew the people and how to reach them better than any man of his time. I heard him tell a great many stories, many of which would not do exactly for the drawing-room; but for the person he wished to reach, and the object he desired to accomplish with the individual, the story did more than any argument could have done.

63. White Australians were sent to Australia as convicts on great big boats. The scum of the earth, sent to the arsehole of the planet. On the way they must have been going 'I can't believe I'm being sent to this shithole, all I did was steal a loaf of bread, and now I'm being sent to this shithole, it's gonna be horrible, I'm going to hate it', then the convicts docked at Bondi Beach. They all looked up and went 'OH YEAH!'...and a nation was born!

64. The great novelists are philosopher-novelists whom write in images instead of arguments.

65. Everyone that works on the show (on the TV side) has done serious time in commercials and movies and we tend to treat every episode of Good Eats like a little movie. I direct them just as I did commercials, heavy on composition.

66. Young children simply aren't interested in Fermat. They just want to hear a story and they're not going to let you do anything else.

67. The Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It's about something that happened to me. [first line/intro]

68. The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of _____; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected.

69. Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

70. This is a Tale about a tail - a tail that belonged to a little red squirrel, and his name was Nutkin.

71. For this world we live in None of us is sly enough. Never do we notice All is lie and bluff. Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army?

72. A friend Alan and I ended up in an Outback pub in a place called Daly Waters and apparently, he says, in the course of this very lively evening we spent there I offered to do a house swap with a family from Korea. We weren't sure whether they were from North Korea or South Korea.

73. We would never travel on the sea if we had no hope of telling about it later... We lose our lives with joy provided people talk about it... Even philosophers wish for admirers.

74. There is a connection between instinct and story-telling.

75. Most reporters I've spoken with want very badly to understand what is happening to her, but the 'why' is really very unimportant. That is just not the point of the show. The journey is how she will deal with this situation, and how it will change her life.

76. What interested me was how much of a departure this was in that you have three interesting, across the generations, female characters, literally riding alongside the male characters. Also the emotional and psychological depth of the characters was, for me, a lot richer than I've seen in a western. But never once did it sacrifice the thrill of the chase. So it was a journey into the unknown for me.

77. How can you capture the sympathies of the audience unless you have a small man, fighting against a bigger one?

78. The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in his books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will say one more thing, even from the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too.

79. His eye brings in almost too rich a harvest for him to deal with, and gives him an aloofness and a hardness which freeze his sentimentalism and make it seem a concession to the public, a veil thrown over the penetrating glance which left to itself pierced to the bone. With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people on the fire.

80. Christopher Reeve turned his focus away from his paralysis and began figuring out how he could live afresh. Reeve decided that a lot of people might like to hear his story. Instead of limiting the communication of his story to letters, books and videos subject to edit, Reeve chose the lecture circuit. That meant showing up in public, allowing the public to gawk at his incapacity, talking about his condition and sharing lessons learned. Thus, Christopher Reeve has become Superman for real.

81. Davey: This one time while we were out in Miami I saw one of those things... [flapping his arms] What do you call those?... Oh yes! A lamp ray jump out of the water. It was amazing.

82. He told of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots ... He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs, and I, a tree, understood words - ah, it seemed my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it.

83. It was reported that the fireworks were beginning and Diana, ever enthusiastic, led the procession to the roof. I was bringing up the rear, had reached the top floor and was about to climb the ladder that led up from it, when I heard the sound of shattered glass followed, after what seemed to me a long interval, by the sound of a falling body. I opened a door from behind which the noise seemed to come and looked into a narrow box-room, on the floor of which Diana was lying. She had fallen through a skylight about twenty-five feet from the floor. The opening was so narrow that the large hat she was wearing remained on the roof. She had broken her thigh... This was not an auspicious beginning to our married life. ~ Duff Cooper in Old Men Forget (1955)

84. On this night 25 years ago, from the testicles of Vince McMahon himself came something so horrifying it sends chills up and down the bodies of men all over the world: tonight marks the birth of Stephanie McMahon.

85. MANKIND: 'Rock, what I'm about to do is show the millions--' THE ROCK: (Rock holds out his hand to stop Mankind) 'Don't you EVER do that again.' LAWLER: 'Gimmick infringement!'

86. There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy...

87. We are told that Shakespeare's plays were generally performed in barns and that no great trouble was taken over the production. The constant changes of scene which, incidentally, seem the sign of a decadent art rather than one which is progressing, were shown by placards with the inscription: 'A Forest,' 'A Prison,' and so on. Within this conventional setting the onlooker's imagination was free to follow the actions of the various characters who were animated by passions drawn from nature, and that was enough for him. So-called innovations are gratefully seized on as an excuse for poverty of invention and in the same way, the long descriptive passages that so overburden modern novels are a sign of sterility, for it is obviously easier to describe a dress or the outward appearance of an object than to trace the subtle development of a character or portray the emotions of the heart.

88. This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the 'Smart Set' in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern-a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.

89. A series of scenes put in a particular order designed to leave the viewer with no choice but to feel one particular way.

90. What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points - romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence. These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.

91. 'Det finns ingenting som inte hant, men mycket som inte berattats.'

92. Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? Garcia Marquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.

93. It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie...

94. The new D&D is too rule intensive. It's relegated the Dungeon Master to being an entertainer rather than master of the game. It's done away with the archetypes, focused on nothing but combat and character power, lost the group cooperative aspect, bastardized the class-based system, and resembles a comic-book superheroes game more than a fantasy RPG where a player can play any alignment desired, not just lawful good.

95. Who so shall telle a tale after a man, He moste reherse, as neighe as ever he can, Everich word, if it be in his charge, All speke he never so rudely and so large; Or elles he moste tellen his tale untrewe, Or feinen thinges, or finden wordes newe.

96. But yet that holden this tale a folly, As of a fox, or of a cock and hen, Taketh the morality, good men. For Saint Paul saith that all that written is, To our doctrine it is y-writ, ywis; Taketh the fruit, and let the chaff be still.

97. Hansel and Gretel discovered the ginger bread house about 45 minutes after they discovered the mushrooms.

98. Nothing is so boring as listening to someone else describe a dream.

99. 'As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself - not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel.'

100. Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.