Storytelling Quotes

Technology allows more people to tell more stories in more ways. Storytelling knows no boundaries. I believe print and web can work beautifully together.

~ Donna Talarico

That is the power of a good story. It can encourage you, it can make you laugh, it can bring you joy. It will make you think, it will tap innto your hidden emotions, and it can make you cry. The power of a story can also bring about healing, give you peace, and change your life! (p.15)

~ Jeff Dixon

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

~ William Zinsser

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

~ Alan Moore

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

~ Brandon Sanderson

funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story

~ Sarah Dessen

All great literature is one of two stories, a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

~ Leo Tolstoy

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

~ Mary Higgins Clark

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

~ Stephen King

Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.

~ William Goldman

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

~ Chris Cleave

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

~ Michael Shermer

I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.

~ Piers Anthony

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.

~ Leslie Marmon Silko

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

~ John Steinbeck

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

~ Norton Juster

Whatever story you're telling, it will be more interesting if, at the end you add, and then everything burst into flames.

~ Brian P. Cleary

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

~ Walter Benjamin

There is no greater power on this earth than story.

~ Libba Bray

[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck--'[Opal] 'Was?'[J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here.

~ Maria V. Snyder

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

~ John Green

Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

~ William Shakespeare

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

~ Donald Miller

You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't.

~ Sandra Dallas

If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.

~ John Steinbeck

I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours

~ Jack Kerouac

Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.

~ Lloyd Alexander

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

~ Lloyd Alexander

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

~ Colum Mccann

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such flourish, that afterwards a man could swear it had been his own memory, and not a tale at all.

~ Seth Grahame-Smith

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

~ Ernest Hemingway

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

~ China Miéville

Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.

~ Eli Clare

She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellites bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. (...), that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.

~ Scott Westerfeld

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

~ Ben Marcus

Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

~ Jennifer Mcmahon

Storytellers don't show, they tell. I'm sticking with that.

~ Ashly Lorenzana