Top 100 Story Telling Quotes
#1. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story.
Jane Austen
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. William Faulkner said, "The only story worth telling is that of the human mind in conflict with itself".
Miles Skedsvold
#7. There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer.
Cecelia Ahern
#8. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#9. I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.
Cameron Diaz
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.
Sharon Salzberg
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#22. The idea of starting with that Kanye [West] song is declarative. It says, "This is the kind of story we're telling."
Akiva Goldsman
#23. 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
#24. Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.
Sam Levenson
#25. [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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#35. Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.
Keith Richards
#36. Just as with the quartet, each part of a painting is telling a different story.
Guido Molinari
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I'm telling a Richard Pryor story through me.
Mike Epps
#43. 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
#44. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.
Judi Dench
#45. The idea of us telling a story where a character doesn't get everything he wants at the end is one of the relatable things - dealing with failures and missteps in life - and it's something that's so rarely dealt with in movies, especially kids' movies.
Dan Scanlon
#46. Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?
Yann Martel
#47. Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.
Pedro Almodovar
#48. The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.
Gurinder Chadha
#49. To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single image.
Lynsey Addario
#50. 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
#51. There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you.
James S.A. Corey
#53. Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.
Suzanne Collins
#54. You're telling the story, creating the sets, doing the lighting, the designing, and establishing the pace.
Bill Sienkiewicz
#55. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.
Haile Gerima
#56. 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
#57. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
#59. Don't see the notes. See the music. See the story it is telling you. Allow the music to change you. Allow it to give you the courage to do whatever you need to
Karen White
#60. When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with.
Lynn Shelton
#61. Yes, it was scary, but every time I got a frisson of fear I tried to remember what Frank Quinn was always telling me. "Susan, believe in yourself. You are the person writing your story.
Susan Boyle
#62. When you're a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you're telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn't like that story, it doesn't feel good.
Carlton Cuse
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Everything you're telling me was just a story, and now it's real.
Kathy Bryson
#66. But I have forgotten to tell you how I came into the world, and am telling you my father's story instead of my own. You seem to like hearing about it though, and you can't understand one without the other.
Thomas Hughes
#67. It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.
Craig McCracken
#68. They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.
Nick Hornby
#69. I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
Ben Lerner
#70. By telling my own story, I hope to help remove the stigma. It never should be something to hide.
Richard Dreyfuss
#71. The more personal you get, the more universal a story you end up telling.
Francesca Gregorini
#72. To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.
Greg McHugh
#73. I hate telling that story to people who've been struggling for years.
Terry Goodkind
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. It's very dangerous for a storyteller to walk into a situation with a political agenda because you end up telling a story about issues instead of telling a story about people.
Peter Landesman
#79. She stared at his nude body in awe. "My God, you look like a Greek god in the moonlight," she whispered.
'Darlin', Greek gods do not have black hair. They're all blonds," he said.
"Darlin,' I'm telling this story and you are a Greek god in it.
Carolyn Brown
#80. I'm telling the story, and if I can't tell the story, I'm not going to sing it. And if I don't agree with the story, and if I got to sing something that portrays me as something I'm not, then I'm not going to sing it either. I didn't even want to sing Aretha Franklin's 'Chain of Fools.'
Sharon Jones
#81. Above all, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don't stick to the established channels. They're informal. They're straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible. They never get bored telling their story.
Jack Welch
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of the film, and it's equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people.
Wes Craven
#85. I'm always pretending that I'm sitting across from somebody. I'm telling them a story and I don't want them to get up until it's finished
James Patterson
#86. 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
#88. In fact, after a while it was the machines I was looking at, not my father at all. They had become him. They were telling me his story. Which
Daniel Wallace
#89. The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.
Alexander McCall Smith
#90. When you write, you are telling a story ... to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself ... over and over again.
Kai Strand
#91. Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
Donald Miller
#92. Because soldiers aren't really brave, they follow orders. Soldiers do as they told. They're not heroes. There are no real heroes, son. It depends on whose telling the story.
Chris Priestley
#93. 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
#94. Maybe our telling of the story wasn't as clear as it should have been, but I don't think that's true. In terms of understanding the story, it comes across.
Joel Coen
#95. 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
#96. I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.
Jeanette Winterson
#97. I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
Amy Hempel
#98. 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
#99. Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism.
Brene Brown
#100. I needed a piece of a story, something real and full of life and blood and breath and heartache, something that someone had lived through, a piece of wisdom earned the hard way. That's why telling our stories is so important.
Shauna Niequist
