Quotes on Telling Stories

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

Everyone sleeps, except lovers, who stay awake, telling stories to God

I feel like in telling stories, there are the things the audience thinks are important, and then there are the things that are actually important.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

I know you're always supposed to want more of everything. But in truth, I'm having a nice ebb and flow of being in my daughter's life every day and getting to keep my work life alive. I'm not nominated for ten thousand everythings every minute, but I am acting and telling stories I love.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.