Storytelling Quotes

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.

~ Charles De Lint

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not.Shouldn't the storyteller believe it.The storyteller should tell it.

~ Cecelia Ahern

You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger's life, and then they're content.

~ Karen Lord

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

~ Donald Miller

There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. 

~ Gerald Hausman

We all have the time we need to tell our stories.

~ Kim Zarins

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.

~ Robert Mckee

A good presentation = Conviction + Story + Message. Subject does't matter.

~ Aayush Jain

An event without a good presentation is like a pizza without cheese.

~ Aayush Jain

A great story can change the world.

~ Stewart Stafford

I can change the story. I am the story.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Why don't you tell me a story?

~ Julie Eshbaugh

Don't think about the writing process too much. Just do one thing: tell the motherfucking story.

~ Don Roff

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

~ David Byrne

Storytelling is the distinctly human implement designed to synthesize our purposeful interaction with reality.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

~ Don Roff

The Book CharmYour Story Will Never End As Long As Your Chapters Are Shared

~ Viola Shipman

(Topper) I’ll story ’em, Fin. I’ll story ’em clean.

~ A.s. Peterson

A thrilling story can be dull if told badly, but even the most mundane event can be elevated into a tale of epic scale by a good storyteller.

~ Johnny Rich

As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

As far as I’m concerned, story is everything. It is why we get up in the morning and how we choose who to take to bed at night. Story is the thread that weaves together the very fabric of reality.

~ J.k. Norry

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.

~ David Levithan

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

~ Marcus Sedgwick

You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty.

~ Sherwood Anderson

I would travel far and wide...seeing, listening, creating. I would weave tales for an enthralled audience. A song would be heard throughout the kingdom, and I would be a part of that. You would normally think that a bard would pick up his tales from stories heard in his travels or, perhaps, from personal observation of these events. Perhaps some bards would create the stories themselves or, at least, adapt the original versions heard... But what if the bard were really more than a bard? What if he were once a gallant knight or an old sea captain...perhaps even a forgotten prince? What if the stories he told, what if the characters brought to life in his stories, were really of his comrades and himself? Stories from long ago that he finally wished to be heard? What if those who listened to his tales, all the while assuming that they were far disconnected from their communicator, were really listening to the narrative of a wanderer intimately connected to it all? And where would such an individual go when his final days as an “official” bard were spent? Perhaps he would decide to retire in a lighthouse. For, surely, no place would be more fitting for the hero emeritus. He would gaze upon the glorious sea in recollection...guiding others with the beacon of light atop his home as he had once been shepherded. The adventurer became the storyteller...and then the Sentinel of the Sea.

~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Once upon a time, there was a story. But no one to tell it.

~ A.d.y. Howle

Stories in themselves are not automatically good, it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

~ Douglas Wilson

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender's Game)

~ Orson Scott Card

People who are left alone tell the story but are never a part of it; those who are a part of the crowd, are story bound, acting upon the role assigned to them in the theater of living, loving and longing.

~ Aporva Kala

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.

~ Margaret Atwood

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

~ Karen Healey

Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone.

~ Stephenie Meyer

When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don’t think the show is off the air. I don’t think there’s a show; I think that’s what the world is like. … The story is our lives.

~ Joss Whedon

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

~ Jo Deurbrouck

I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

~ Margaret Atwood

Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.

~ James Wood

Art is a captured emotion. When I say this I mean all artists, whether you are a photographer, a writer, or sculptor, you are trying to capture the way someone or something made you feel. As a story teller I am trying to captivate the audience and allow them to feel just a small portion of the emotion I am desperately trying to preserve.

~ Tommy Tran

The pleasures of being a novelist are many.  But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally within my own creative psyche.  I'm like a cat with untold lives, because each new book is my rebirth.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business.  I am a storyteller.  Daydreaming is the best part of my job.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. This is different from what we call history. Mythical stories, when you trace them back to their origin, often have a sacredness, a holy quality that comes from the bedrock of lore from which they emerged.

~ Gerald Hausman