Top 100 Quotes About Telling Stories
#1. Australian Aborigines say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.
Robert Moss
#2. What is crucial is the provision of opportunities for telling all the diverse stories, for interpreting membership as well as ethnicity, for making inescapable the braids of experience woven into the fabric of America's plurality.
Maxine Greene
#3. I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.
Cameron Diaz
#4. My mother was a very hard-working maid, and their stories are worth telling.
Judy Reyes
#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. 'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.
Chris Crutcher
#7. But as a wise and great teacher once explained so patiently, all good stories - stories that touch your soul, stories that change your nature, stories that cause you to become a better person from their telling-these stories always contain truth.
Camron Wright
#8. We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.
Arthur Kleinman
#9. I had just come off doing a lot of commercials when I did 'Go,' so a part of the fast pace and efficiency comes from the discipline I had to learn from telling stories in 25-second increments, and that type of discipline is insane.
Doug Liman
#10. The point of telling our stories, even if only to ourselves, is to help us resurrect the parts we have buried. When we unearth them, even if it's difficult, we can integrate them into our sense of who we are. Often in our buried self our true power lies.
Helen LaKelly Hunt
#11. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
#12. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
Dana Brunetti
#14. Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.
Sam Levenson
#15. We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.
Yahoo Serious
#16. I've always loved books. My mother told me that before I could talk, I'd babble in my crib as I turned the pages of my little cloth books, apparently telling stories to go along with the pictures.
JoAnn Ross
#17. 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
#18. You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.
Neil LaBute
#19. Sacred bleeding fuck, I said, because, I mean its one thing to know your crazy hocus brother sees ghosts, and a whole different thing when you find out they're telling him bedtime stories.
Sarah Monette
#20. I'm a conduit for telling people's stories. It's a privilege.
Tori Amos
#21. In telling our stories, we have to give up part of our imagination, because if I ever told my daughter about this night, I would have to choose the details to tell it, limit the possibilities.
Daniel Chacon
#22. Walking, talking, reading, drawing, praying, telling stories: the nourishment is there, as close as our own breath. We only have to pause a moment, notice, and enjoy.
Christian McEwen
#23. I feel like I'm selling something nobody want to buy. Something big and stinky, like Kiki Brown and her lemon smell-good polish. But what really makes me and Kiki the same is, I'm proud a what I'm selling. I can't help it. We telling stories that need to be told.
Kathryn Stockett
#24. Admittedly, the masturbation story is just a "Hey, this is one of my best-of's, I'll throw it in the special." But the grandmother stuff, really, I feel like is part of the theme and part of the best way to end the story that I'm telling with the special.
Jen Kirkman
#25. I learned early on that there are all sorts of stories I have no place telling.
Peter Hedges
#26. Telling the proper stories is as if you were approaching the throne of Heaven in a fiery chariot.
Baal Shem Tov
#27. It's the big question of every TV show, right, where you have these two people who it's clear the world wants to put them together and everyone wants to see them together, but also when you're telling these stories you can't throw these people together immediately.
Patrick J. Adams
#28. I didn't know it until the end. All stories worth telling are love stories.
Julianna Baggott
#29. Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.
Keith Richards
#30. Just as with the quartet, each part of a painting is telling a different story.
Guido Molinari
#31. 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
#32. Maybe I shouldn't scare off my date so quickly by shooting guns and telling stories about vomit, but, hey, the sooner he knows the real me, the better.
Vicki Lesage
#33. We need art. We've been telling stories since the beginning. As human beings, we need it for our survival.
Lili Taylor
#34. The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.
Flemming Rose
#35. The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. He takes time telling stories, too.
Rich Cohen
#36. Are you going to tell me what that was about?" Adam asked as we went back upstairs.
"Sometime," I told him. "When we're telling ghost stories around a campfire, and I want to scare you.
Patricia Briggs
#37. There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.
Aaron Sorkin
#38. You have to appreciate the readers, without them there are no stories worth telling.
Andrew Lennon
#39. I feel that we should try and understand how we as women storytellers have often fallen into the mode of telling stories in the ways in which traditionally men would. I often find that my points of view are expressed by male characters.
Danae Elon
#40. Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?
Yann Martel
#41. The startling truth is this: as this narrative unfolded, amidst all the voices breaking free, telling their stories for the first time, the loudest voice of all was that of Norman Rockwell.
Jane Allen Petrick
#42. As you get older and you hopefully battle your own demons, you find other reasons why you want to be an actor. The people that I truly admire do this because they love telling stories and they love the make-believe of the moment and not so much the gratification afterwards.
Eric Balfour
#43. 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
#44. Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers. I wanted to watch what my actors were doing and how they were telling the story.
Paul Bettany
#45. I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.
Box Brown
#46. When I started out, I really struggled as a comic because no one knew who I was, and sometimes I was telling stories, so it would take a while for people to get on board for things.
Mike Birbiglia
#47. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Kim Edwards
#48. My dad hasn't said much about his college days. Oh, a few times, he might start telling stories. And I've seen some highlight film of him from college. I remember thinking he looked really small. Which is funny, because growing up, I thought he was a pretty big guy.
Andrew Luck
#49. I don't think I have what it takes to make a good action game. I think I'm better at telling a story.
Hironobu Sakaguchi
#50. I think that stories, and the telling of stories, are the foundations of human communication and understanding. If children all over the country are watching films, asking questions and telling their stories, then the world will eventually be a better place.
Beeban Kidron
#51. The idea for actors is to make a living telling stories, so if you can do that, then you're way ahead of the game.
John C. McGinley
#52. On a couple of occasions I've shocked myself. Pet Sematery was appalling when it first came out on to the page.
Stephen King
#53. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
#54. When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me.
Janet Evanovich
#55. By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
#56. I get quite disappointed that we're still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they're saying about women.
Romola Garai
#57. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
Gloria Steinem
#58. Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. We ain't doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.
Kathryn Stockett
#60. By telling my own story, I hope to help remove the stigma. It never should be something to hide.
Richard Dreyfuss
#61. I love telling stories that allow people to be less afraid to tell theirs.
Gina Rodriguez
#62. The more personal you get, the more universal a story you end up telling.
Francesca Gregorini
#63. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what's going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These
Charles Duhigg
#64. I love seeing my book on shelves and getting letters from people who liked the book. I love telling stories and having other people tell stories to me.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#65. Tonight is the night of telling our stories. You tell three and I four.
Avijeet Das
#66. More people telling stories leads to more interesting perspectives in this world. I often think we wouldn't get to these political impasses if we had balance in storytelling.
Reese Witherspoon
#67. 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
#68. I have people constantly come up to me telling me that I have written their life. When I wrote the story I thought it was a pretty good story but I had no idea that many people felt like that.
Blackie
#69. 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
#70. I just enjoyed telling stories. I enjoyed watching films and reading and becoming someone else. I spent a lot of time on my own when I was younger; I enjoyed my own company and still do, so it was a source of escapism.
Tuppence Middleton
#71. I wasn't sure how people were going to take to the stories I was telling and the things I wanted to sing about.
Jackson Harris
#72. Hopefully life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come. Do stuff you will want to brag about.
Rachel Maddow
#74. I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters.
Georgie Henley
#75. I have always had such sincere love for truth, that I have often begun by telling stories for the purpose of getting truth to enter the heads of those who could not appreciate its charms.
Giacomo Casanova
#76. 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
#77. When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.
Steven Spielberg
#78. One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach!
Camron Wright
#79. It sounds trite, but I like telling stories.
Rebecca Hall
#80. Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
Donald Miller
#81. 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
#82. What bugs me is that you believe what you're saying. What bothers me is that you don't know how you feel. What scares me is that while you're telling me stories, you actually believe that they are real.
Ani DiFranco
#83. I love telling stories, telling jokes, making people laugh. I've got no plans to stop doing it.
David Alan Basche
#84. Cursing, telling smutty stories, smearing the good name of another, and referring irreverently to God and the Scriptures may be considered as coming under the expression corrupt speech. Our speech is to be clean, pure, and wholesome.
Billy Graham
#85. The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.
Olivier Dahan
#86. For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.
Nancy Kress
#88. I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.
Joel Stein
#89. When it comes to telling children stories, they don't need simple language. They need beautiful language.
Philip Pullman
#90. Telling a story is like trying to eat grapes with a fork. It's always trying to get away from you. And if you're a good author, and you've challenged yourself, and you're telling big stories, there's more and more that's trying to get away from you simultaneously.
Brent Weeks
#91. Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way.
Jay-Z
#92. There is a direness in the construction of safety, in the telling of theretofore untold stories.
Carrie Brownstein
#93. The same basic tools we've used for thousands of years to connect with people, to draw them in and to hold their attention will always work, even if we're telling our stories 140 characters at a time.
Shawn Amos
#94. I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.
Asif Kapadia
#95. When I ask my parents, it's incredibly obvious I was going to have a creative career at an early age. I've been forever telling stories since I was very young.
Sophie Kennedy Clark
#96. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural.
Shauna Niequist
#97. She was an original ... She was an eccentric. She'd come alive like a fire, telling funny stories and entertaining everyone, then she'd suddenly run out of fuel, make her excuses and leave. You always knew when she'd had enough. Those that didn't would find themselves talk to the walls.
Santa Montefiore
#98. Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.
Seth Shostak
#99. And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.
Ali Smith
#100. Romance novels feature nuanced portrayals of female characters having adventures, making choices, and accepting themselves just as they are. When we say these stories are silly and unrealistic, we are telling young girls not to expect to be the heroines in their own real lives.
Maya Rodale
