Storytelling Quotes

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

~ Rabih Alameddine

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

~ Chuck Klosterman

But that wouldn't be honest. That wouldn't be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it's obvious where to start--BIRTH--and even more obvious where to stop--DEATH. Fade from black to black. I won't have it. I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that 'should' come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn't living easy? Isn't it grand? As easy as reading aloud.No.If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I've been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can't. I can't tell you that lie...If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I'm doing.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Real life is never quite as interesting as the story told afterward.

~ Laurence Overmire

A Writer is Actor, Creator, Director & Producer Of HIS Life. Ask ME anything.

~ Nirav Sanchaniya

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

~ Sara Sheridan

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

~ Sara Sheridan

This love is hard core. Let's make it soft porn.

~ Arzum Uzun

Be a burst of joy.

~ A.d. Posey

Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions (happy is boring, evil is interesting) about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don’t view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it’s a rare commodity attained through dumb luck….It’s possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that does not paralyze the will or sap ambition….the number one trait of happy people is a serious determination to be happy. Bliss is a habit you can cultivate, in other words, not an accident.

~ Rob Brezsny

Children played at those stories, they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

~ Gregory Maguire

It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.

~ Haruki Murakami

They weren't true stories, they were better than that.

~ Alice Hoffman

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

~ Orson Scott Card

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Do you want the truth or fiction?

~ Jon Chopan

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as the technique of the short story or the technique of the novel. Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

~ Flannery O'connor

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us...as individuals-and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind.

~ Yann Martel

There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words(The Watcher O' The Dead)

~ John Guinan

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.

~ Jonathan Gottschall

Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic.

~ A.d. Posey

Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.

~ A.d. Posey

It will be worth it if I am remembered, if not flatteringly, then at least with some small amount of accuracy.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

~ C.s. Lewis

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

~ Sol Luckman

For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.

~ The Inkslinger

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

~ Oliver Sacks

In life your rewards come from the gifts you give to others.

~ Ken Donaldson

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.

~ John Dufresne

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men--that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.

~ Susan Fletcher

In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.

~ Patricia Storace

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.

~ Ben Okri

It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment. I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.

~ Rob Brezsny

Learning is essential for living the life you love.

~ A.d. Posey

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

~ Sara Sheridan

Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time. And so I tell my story to you, as the Mariner told his: he, standing outside the wedding party, snatching at a passing wrist, paralyzing his victim with his gaze; I, standing with my family at the edge of this immortal forest. I tell this story because telling this story is what I must do.

~ Garth Stein

A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.

~ Daniel Yergin

Creativity is magic in the making.

~ A.d. Posey

Creativity is divine.

~ A.d. Posey

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

~ Charlie Kaufman