Quotes on Storytelling

If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

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

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.

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

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.

It's populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

If your stories are all about your products and services, that's not storytelling. It's a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.