Or Telling Quotes

#1. Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.

Tom Waits

#2. You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.

John Malkovich

#3. The happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn't mean that the story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

Karen Joy Fowler

#4. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

#5. A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories ... the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound.

Lucy O'Brien

#6. When we get christened or married or die, we drift naturally in the direction of the church. And in moments of crisis, when our spiritual Tom-Tom is no longer telling us what to do, we find ourselves scrabbling at the vicarage door.

Tom Hollander

#7. When I'm feeling sad, or lonely, and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know where I'm going, I imagine the Cool Awesome Future Version of Myself just telling my present self, "It's okay. You just gotta grab that giraffe by the ears and ride it on out."

Jenna Marbles

#8. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#9. It doesn't matter if you're a size 2 or 22, you can be healthy as long as you're taking care of your body, working out, and telling yourself 'I love you' instead of taking in the negativity of beauty standards.

Ashley Graham

#10. The balance when you're catching people up, and the craft of what we do as actors, is to try to make sure that the exposition sounds like thought and dialogue, and a plan or a problem or something that is motivationally induced, rather than just telling the audience information.

Jack Coleman

#11. Or as hockey player Sergei Fedorov knows it, 'The day I can legally start telling everyone I am sleeping with Anna Kournikova.'

Craig Kilborn

#12. I get very protective of kids on set. I always make a point of telling kids that anything that makes them feel unsafe or concerned they should just speak up about, and then keep an eye on times when that could present an issue.

Julia Ormond

#13. Perhaps one day the man in the black jacket will think about this too: why he only wondered if it was Kevin or Amat who was telling the truth. Why Maya's word wasn't enough.

Fredrik Backman

#14. When you tell the children tales of the Baba Yaga on a cold winter's night, you might remember to mention that whether or not the witch is wicked often depends on who is telling the story.

Deborah Blake

#15. Try patting them on the back or shoulder and telling them everything is going to be fine. Lots of times when girls cry, they don't want you to fix the problem, they just want to be consoled.

Kiera Cass

#16. Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.

Harriet Lerner

#17. The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

Edward St. Aubyn

#18. He saw the threat of the family being destroyed by not being open to life or children. Paul VI was brave. He was a good pastor. He alerted his sheep, telling them that the wolves were approaching.

Pope Francis

#19. You want to have a song that people will listen to and go, 'Oh, yeah! That reminds me of something in my life,' or, 'something I'm currently going through,' or maybe something happens later and you hear the song and go, 'Wow! That really was telling a story that I can relate to now.' That's my hope.

Pegi Young

#20. Everyone keeps me telling me how great a knee replacement is. Whitey Ford said it was great and so did Ralph Branca. If I had one of those, I don't know that I would retire. But if I left for a month or more, who's going to want me back?

Don Zimmer

#21. What is it they say about telling lies? You have to remember every detail, and sooner or later you get caught.

Adrian R. Magnuson

#22. She didn't know if she cried for what she'd lost as a teenager, or for the confused tangle of emotions inside her now. Either way, Mike telling her that he was sorry against the top of her head was the only answer that made any sense.

Lauren Gilley

#23. I'm not comfortable telling my kids how they should be or how they should think or how they should act or anything else.

Mark Martin

#24. My mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

Charles Bukowski

#25. If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

Alfred Brendel

#26. Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.

Jonathan Galassi

#27. There are times that all you need is someone who will listen to you without judging you - not telling you what you should have done or should do, but simply, listening to you

Bernard Kelvin Clive

#28. A crowd is the only way to know if something works. Telling a friend or two doesn't matter. A crowd is what tells you what works or doesn't, so I'd rather go in front of them cold and see.

Ted Alexandro

#29. It shouldn't be the asylum seekers wondering which country they want go to. It should be Europe telling them where to be, be it Lithuania, Sweden, or wherever.

Mark Rutte

#30. But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.

Jami Attenberg

#31. Marriage is not mainly about being or staying in love. It's mainly about telling the truth with our lives. It's about portraying something true about Jesus Christ and the way He relates to his people. It is about showing in real life the glory of the gospel.

John Piper

#32. You've got to trust the ground you're standing on and the work you've done in telling your story. The goal should be to bring those thousands of people - viewers - together and make them one. When you feel that happening, it's usually in silence, not applause or laughter.

Kevin Spacey

#33. When I'm telling stories of my video game days, when I was a really hardcore MMO player, I played 'EverQuest' for two years and played 'World of Warcraft' and several other games for the last ten years or so ... 95% of the stories I'll tell you are 'EverQuest.'

R.A. Salvatore

#34. or maybe love is summed up in moments - that day in the park, the time you had chinese food by candlelight, when the boy you liked left a message, finally, on your machine. maybe the telling of those moments is even better than the moments themselves.

Emily Franklin

#35. Atticus sometimes said that one way to tell whether a witness was lying or telling the truth was to listen rather than watch.

Harper Lee

#36. At the risk of sounding like that old guy in 'Gran Torino' telling those 'young punks' to 'get off my lawn,' it's gotten to the point that whenever I hear somebody talking about Twitter or twittering or tweeting, it just makes my little tummy want to hurl.

John Ridley

#37. None of my English teachers in college were praising me or telling me I was anything special. But then in creative writing classes they were. And I enjoyed those more anyway.

John Brandon

#38. Telling someone they're wrong is not the same as leading or inspiring them to do what's right.

Andy Stanley

#39. You've got to commit to something. I'm not telling you it has to be your life's dream or that it'll get you a Nobel Prize. But it will earn you more ownership of yourself. Commit to something
that is the essence of soul-searching.

Laura C. Schlessinger

#40. And eventually your loss normalizes - it integrates into part of your everyday life and you find yourself three or five years later doing okay, changed but . . . but still able to hear your friends' voices, still telling stories about them, still thinking of them every day.

Gayle Forman

#41. I find a lot of people struggling in their lives because they feel like it was expected they do a certain thing or act a certain way and not follow what their gut is telling them to do.

Kelly Oxford

#42. I am not writing to flatter paternal egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.

Charlotte Bronte

#43. He used to tell her everything, and she used to listen in rapt attention. She wondered when that had changed and who'd lost interest first, he in the telling or she in the listening.

Lisa Genova

#44. Parents of recovered children, and I've met hundreds, all share the same experience of doubters and deniers telling us our child must have never even had autism or that the recovery was simply nature's course. We all know better, and frankly we're too busy helping other parents to really care.

Jenny McCarthy

#45. I didn't feel like I'd really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I'd come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.

John Darnielle

#46. I don't care about people kissing my ass or telling me how great I am. I don't really give a damn. I read the bad stuff a whole lot more than I read the good stuff. I read that because there are always going to be critics who are going to say how good you aren't.

Richard Sherman

#47. Whenever you're unhappy, your emotions are telling you that the people or things around you are not conforming to your vision of the world, or the way you think things should be.

Ken Keyes Jr.

#48. The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.

Octavia E. Butler

#49. What I look for is identifying what the utility of a character is to the telling of the story overall. If I can identify that from reading the script, then I've got a clear idea of whether or not I think the character is worth playing.

Harrison Ford

#50. Don't try to sound cool. Guys do that all the time, and I'm telling you it's a complete turnoff, okay? Just be you. You're cute; live with it. But don't try to sound like James Bond or something, because you're not. - Summer Sumner

Ridley Pearson

#51. Okay, you're telling the truth. By the way, Nick, you have the most screwed-up life. You're either boring as all get out, or you're about to die. There's no middle ground with you. You might want to work on that.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#52. Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#53. I am not interested in having somebody telling that what I have to water down my message or that some advertising person would not like it.

Franny Armstrong

#54. Would I be telling them in order to enrich their education or to enrich myself?

Kevin Jennings

#55. Don't you remember telling me that you're the brain and I'm the brawn? Naturally I expect you to do all the talking. And naturally I shall knockheads and toss people out of windows as required. Or did I misunderstand? Did you want me to think, too?

Loretta Chase

#56. Rachel had decided he WAS handsome during their hike to the camp. Though the way he kept telling her to speak more quietly or to look where she was going was annoying. By the time they finally got there, she was beginning to think his looks were his only good attribute.

Teri Hall

#57. My mother treats me exactly the same as she has always done, and the same as my older sisters. She tells me off when I need it, and sometimes I do need telling to go to my room or to do my homework.

Georgie Henley

#58. Playing the guitar is like telling the truth - you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don't have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don't have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It's you.

B.B. King

#59. I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.

David Tennant

#60. I don't have anyone telling me to change things or giving me unwanted opinions. It's just me and my band making music. It's nice for a change.

Kevin Fowler

#61. I saw everyone, a shifting sea of discomfort and sadness, each person carrying his own pain, each telling her own stories, no story more or less tragic or triumphant than any other.

Jennifer Brown

#62. Depending on the story that you're telling, you can be relatable to everybody or nobody. I try and tell everybody's story.

Chance The Rapper

#63. To start telling people that you're beautiful, or just feel beautiful, just start acting like you are the most beautiful woman in the world. And it really improves everything! Because your sort of psyche responds to it - like this is truthful!

Margaret Cho

#64. I remember telling the 'Tangled' crew about grimace moments: how when you watch a movie that you worked on and you think, 'Ah, I wish we could have done that scene better,' or, 'I wish that we'd had the time or the money to fix that particular story problem.'

Roy Conli

#65. The ruach blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but cannot tell from where it comes or where it goes. God is He, He is Ruach (Spirit) and Ruach is speaking to our ruach (spirit) revealing great mysteries, knowledge, wisdom, understanding and joy.

Sipporah Joseph

#66. Our biggest fear is not in expressing the truth but that we will be attacked or belittled because of our truth.

Kelli Wilson

#67. Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors!

Kurt Vonnegut

#68. Evangelism is not salesmanship. It is not urging people, pressing them, coercing them, overwhelming them, or subduing them. Evangelism is telling a message. Evangelism is reporting good news.

Richard Halverson

#69. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

Lisa Marbly-Warir

#70. Everything can be ridiculous or tragic according to who is doing the telling or how they tell it.

Javier Marias

#71. We insult her everyday on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she's young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb

John Lennon

#72. I'm not telling people where to give money, but if there is to be a spotlight shed on me, then I'd like to direct that spotlight onto causes I think are worthy or onto interesting, progressive figures.

Scarlett Johansson

#73. There is no such thing as bragging. You're either lying or telling the truth.

Curt Flood

#74. I'm not a career filmmaker. I just like to do things that I still kind of believe in and because of that you just never know what's going to happen next. It doesn't matter if it's been a good year or a bad year: next year, there's no telling what it will be like.

Peter Mullan

#75. My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings.

Kathleen Norris

#76. I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

Colm Meaney

#77. But it is important always to keep in mind that the danger of harming humans is not connected only or even mainly with telling secrets, there can be great danger in keeping secrets.

Daniel Ellsberg

#78. If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

Dashiell Hammett

#79. I remember tap-dancing and singing in front of the TV when I was a kid, telling my dad to stop watching Ed Sullivan or Milton Berle and watch me.

Andie MacDowell

#80. I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I'd watched a movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a boy.

John Green

#81. Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.

Robert McKee

#82. Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.

Tobias Wolff

#83. I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?

Laurie Notaro

#84. Little lies that make people feel better are not bad, like thanking someone for a meal they made even if you hated it, or telling a sick person they look better when they don't, or someone with a hideous new hat that it's lovely. But to yourself you must tell the truth

Louise Fitzhugh

#85. For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it's like being a mirror; if they didn't have me to look at, they wouldn't be able to put the make-up on.

Jane Campion

#86. Don't apologize. Don't explain. Don't ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it.

Shonda Rhimes

#87. Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider.

Caitlin Moran

#88. There were no horns sticking out of his head or third eye in between his two gorgeous blue ones. There were only the most kissable lips, set on a perfectly sculpted face, telling me that he would do anything to protect me.

L.J. Kentowski

#89. I've never met or spoken to David Lee Roth, yet it's rather ironic that even he's saying Eddie's lying about things. I'm saying he's not telling the truth, yet Eddie insists that the two of us are lying! You be the judge.

Sammy Hagar

#90. Poetry is an art of telling the poet's own truth my bending and twisting it with his or her own emotional bulldozer.

Debasish Mridha

#91. Every single one of us possesses the strength to attempt something he isn't sure he can accomplish. It can be running a mile, or a 10K race, or 100 miles. It can be changing a career, losing 5 pounds, or telling someone you love her (or him).

Scott Jurek

#92. I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target.

Sherman Alexie

#93. Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.

Erri De Luca

#94. I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.

Dario Argento

#95. The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Richard Russo

#96. Together we would make reputation, we would have men in halls across Britain telling the story of our exploit. Or of our deaths. They were friends, they were oath-men, they were young, they were warriors, and with such men it might be possible to storm the gates of Asgard itself.

Bernard Cornwell

#97. Hallelujah! Amen! Christianity is so inherent in western story-telling, you can't really get around it. But it wasn't something that drew me to it more or less.

Keanu Reeves

#98. But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness, there's no telling what I might do

Claire Messud

#99. Some men will spin out a long prayer telling God who and what he is, or they pray out a whole system of divinity. Some people preach, others exhort the people, till everybody wishes they would stop, and God wishes so, too, most undoubtedly.

Charles Grandison Finney

#100. And maybe now it's about telling the occasional story that I recently believe in and think would be good to put out there into the world. But I look back, that crying taught me how to approach everything in life. Acting or Otherwise.

Drew Barrymore