Top 100 Story Telling Quotes
#1. I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.
Cameron Diaz
#2. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
Linwood Barclay
#3. I had come out of the city, where story-telling is a manufactured science, to the country where story-telling is a by-product of life.
Dana Burnet
#4. With correction, and given the chance, 'Terra Nova' can and will deliver seasons of transcendent images and story-telling. Failing to renew 'Terra Nova' is shortsighted, as myopic as it would have been to scrap the Hubble. 'Terra Nova' is the Hubble Telescope of television.
Stephen Lang
#5. When I went to America, I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.
Pierce Brosnan
#6. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
#7. 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
#8. I've always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.
Dave Gibbons
#9. 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
#11. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Arundhati Roy
#12. Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal.
Neel Burton
#13. My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.
Sufjan Stevens
#14. Marketing, when done well, is about story telling.
Evan Williams
#15. I am fortunate enough to have worked on, and continue to work on, evolutionary movies in all formats from just simple good story telling, which still matters most of all, to CG movies to tent-pole size 3D movies, and genre 3D movies like 'Piranha 3D.'
Mark Canton
#16. The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
Elizabeth Bowen
#17. The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.
Joseph Jacobs
#18. Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.
Michael Shermer
#19. I want to make movies that people see. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do.
Alden Ehrenreich
#20. Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes.
Andrew Neel
#21. Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.
Soledad O'Brien
#22. You know there's some great folks, great story telling at 'Dateline,' and I'm glad to be a part of it.
Lester Holt
#23. If I had to define my philosophy, it would be about exploration, a journey, a story-telling.
Hussein Chalayan
#24. I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research ... for ways of augmenting story-telling.
Malcolm Gladwell
#25. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do. So I really want to be a part of those movies that say something good to a lot of people.
Alden Ehrenreich
#26. Sometimes there's a disjoint between what works on the page and what works with visual story telling.
Duncan Jones
#27. Miss the audience's heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That's because the heart is always the first target in story telling.
Peter Guber
#28. Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.
Anthony Horowitz
#29. Elrond's house was perfect, whether you liked food or sleep or story-telling or singing (or reading), or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness ... Evil things did not come into the secret valley of Rivendell.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#30. I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.
Ayshay
#31. I think violence, cynicism, brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling, going back to people sitting around fires, the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of that tradition.
Eric Stoltz
#33. The most important thing is story-telling. It's as singular and old-fashioned as that.
David Soul
#34. In these story telling moments we equip our children, with crucial solution tools for life. To deprive them of these necessary teachable moments is like denying a carpenter the tools of his trade.
Drexel Deal
#35. [On Jason Mashak's "I Was Trained to See Shadows", in his poetry book SALTY AS A LIP:] A nice bit of smooth, full-bodied, surreal story telling. I like it.
John Bennett
#36. The question, then, is not "Is story telling science?" but "Can science learn to tell good stories?" (p. 50)
Irving Seidman
#37. Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking.
Ada Maria Soto
#38. I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don't do that, I tell jokes - the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub.
Jimmy Carr
#39. Wherever we live and wherever we come from is our individual heartland. Anything is possible and everything can happen. Pure imagination is in all of us - we only need to discover it, and sometimes story telling helps.
Mackenzie Flohr
#40. One of the things I want to do with 'Desi Rascals' is go a bit deeper into the characters and their family lives and have a bit more heart and a bit more inter-generational story-telling, so it's not all about young people.
Gurinder Chadha
#41. For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.
C.S. Lewis
#42. Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.
Matt Groening
#43. Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.
Amanda Burton
#44. His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#45. Writing is a tough business, but never forget the reason why you write. It's for the love of story telling. Fame and fortune may elude you, but that's no reason to give up. Remember, there's always someone ready to listen to a good story.
Robert Bartram
#46. I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
John Sayles
#47. I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!
Ashly Lorenzana
#48. I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.
Bruce Dickinson
#49. I think as long as the standard of quality, the story-telling, film-making, acting etc. etc. remains consistent, then you've got a good change of making a decent anthology.
Neil Marshall
#50. I wanted wherever possible to lean into the comic form and do things in the story telling that could only be done in comics and which pay homage to the many strands of comic and visual storytelling tradition.
Arvind Ethan David
#51. Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
Walt Disney
#52. Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
Tom Stoppard
#53. Stories are our attempts to share our values & beliefs with the hopes that we may attract those who believe what we believe. This is the basis of forming a trusting relationship. Story telling, therefor, is only worthwhile when it tells what you stand for, not what you do.
Simon Sinek
#54. Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.
Susan Howatch
#55. I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
Isak Dinesen
#56. Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,
frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
Jonathan Swift
#57. story telling is not a career, it's a calling. I've been writing true and compelling news my entire professional life. My novels are packs of lies
Glen Carter
#58. We're all story-telling creatures, and also I think that's the point about biography because the life is exemplary.
Rachel Holmes
#59. My wife is the fact-checker, I'm in the story telling business.
Baz Luhrmann
#60. 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
#61. All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#62. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story.
Jane Austen
#63. There might be a proper age to know how to tell a story, but there's no proper age to start telling them.
Xavier Dolan
#64. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.
Flannery O'Connor
#65. I'm a sci-fi fan, and I guess you have to let go of some of that at some point, and realize that as long as you're focused on telling a story that you care about, at the end of the day, that's what really matters, even to hard-core sci-fi fans.
Rian Johnson
#66. 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
#67. William Faulkner said, "The only story worth telling is that of the human mind in conflict with itself".
Miles Skedsvold
#68. There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer.
Cecelia Ahern
#69. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#70. A myth, in its original Greek meaning- muthos- is simply that: a story, one which seeks to render life transparent to an intelligible source.
Jules Cashford
#71. My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.
Vivienne Westwood
#72. I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.
Robert Kurson
#73. Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.
Sharon Salzberg
#74. Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.
C.S. Lewis
#75. When I am telling it, it doesn't seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are
more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story
one after the other. It is queer.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#76. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.
Gwenda Bond
#77. Like JJ Abrams, creators just want to tell a story and entertain people. So why only focus in one way of telling it?Give readers another way to connect with your story. Entertainment does not need to be contained in one medium. Think about telling your story in many mediums.
Anne-Rae Vasquez
#78. 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
#79. It will be a great story when I'm an old man telling my grandkids that I was once the best player in the world.
Luke Donald
#80. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#81. The idea of starting with that Kanye [West] song is declarative. It says, "This is the kind of story we're telling."
Akiva Goldsman
#82. 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
#83. Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.
Sam Levenson
#84. [A]ll these years, I had been telling myself that my feelings for you were a juvenile infatuation; a dream inspired by my secret hope that somewhere there could be a creature who could love me.
Kellyn Roth
#85. 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
#86. I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.
Norman Vincent Peale
#87. People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.
Dorothy Allison
#88. 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
#90. I remember facing him on opening day in 1987. It was Oakland at the Minnesota Twins, the first time I got him out on a breaking ball down-and-in and next at bat he hit the same pitch for a home run. I was telling my kids that story yesterday.
Curt Young
#91. A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.
Matthew J. Kirby
#92. 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
#93. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#94. Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.
Keith Richards
#95. Just as with the quartet, each part of a painting is telling a different story.
Guido Molinari
#96. 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
#97. I'd love to take a stab at writing videogames. There are a lot of storytelling opportunities that really aren't being taken advantage of in that field. I'd like to experiment with telling a truly non-linear story.
Patrick Rothfuss
#98. It's a lot more than clicking the shutter ... it's the ideas, it's the visual voice, it's the telling the story, it's kind of going beyond that initial thing that just means you happened to be there at the right time.
Ron Haviv
#99. I'm telling a Richard Pryor story through me.
Mike Epps
#100. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.
Judi Dench
