Top 100 Storyteller Quotes
#1. My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
Stephen Greenblatt
#2. First and foremost, I'm an oral storyteller - I'll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.
Isobelle Carmody
#3. Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.
Daniel Alarcon
#4. From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.
Athol Fugard
#5. I tend to write my beginnings and endings first - as a cartoonist and storyteller, I couldn't sit down every day if I didn't know where the story was headed.
Jeff Lemire
#6. I'm an old storyteller. [When] I tell the story, it's about the story.
Nikki Giovanni
#7. Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.
Rick Perlstein
#8. You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.
Isabel Allende
#9. The special skills necessary for being a storyteller are really very simple. I actually talked about them in a book of mine called 'Tell Me a Tale.' Those basic skills are to listen, to observe, to remember, and to share.
Joseph Bruchac
#10. I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.
Roberto Benigni
#11. You are the storyteller and the editor of your book of life. So write tales of imagination, tragedy, and adventure and illustrate it with the colors of beauty.
Debasish Mridha
#12. I don't look at myself as a writer; I am a storyteller.
Vikas Swarup
#13. When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for the storyteller.
Jim Henson Company
#14. I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#15. I'm a storyteller; that is what I do. And I'm particularly interested in history; and in history of a certain era. But what is interesting for me is how many, how many things you see repeated.
Jacqueline Winspear
#16. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.
Orson Scott Card
#17. For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#19. I keep trying to train myself to stop saying 'filmmaker' and start saying 'storyteller.' We're telling stories.
Christine Vachon
#20. Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.
Tom Clancy
#21. I am definitely a storyteller, but probably not a traditional Storyteller.
James Welch
#22. I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.
Bryce Courtenay
#23. Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State displays Lisa Borders' emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing way of life.
Christopher Castellani
#24. I've always been a writer, I've always been a storyteller, but I never thought about screenwriting.
Diablo Cody
#25. Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.
Kevin Spacey
#26. Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.
Ruth Park
#27. I'm a storyteller and the Bible is a bunch of stories about life and things that took place here on planet earth. It's a great example to use and a great reason to be happy about being a storyteller because the lessons of the land are always in stories.
Nas
#28. A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner
Michael Chabon
#29. 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
#30. I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.
Adam Rapp
#31. For a storyteller, an open ending leaves much room for imagination; for the inquisitive reader, however, it is a source of great anxiety.
Joyce Rachelle
#32. If you look at the least effective of the 'Twilight' movies, it was when they brought in an action-movie director instead of a director who was really a good storyteller. And you can tell the difference.
Mark Waters
#33. I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
Stephen Greenblatt
#34. What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that." Kaladin
Brandon Sanderson
#37. Whether it was true or false seems ultimately of little importance.
Donald Sturrock in 'Storyteller. The Life of Roald Dahl
Donald Sturrock
#39. I am not a great prose stylist. I'm a storyteller. There are thousands of people who don't like what I do. Fortunately, there are millions who do.
James Patterson
#40. So my sister dances and the dead house burns, and I scrawl these few last words by the light of its burning. I know I should toss this story, too, on those flames. But I am still too much a storyteller -or at least a storykeeper-still too much my father's daughter to burn these pages.
Jean Hegland
#41. Whether I'm telling stories in songs or if directing is the next step, being a storyteller is what I like doing.
Kelly Jones
#42. I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level.
Ayad Akhtar
#43. I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex - a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses ... I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.
Stephen King
#44. Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller.
Laila Lalami
#45. I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.
Nicholas Meyer
#47. Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.
Bryan Way
#48. Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?
Elie Wiesel
#49. James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.
Edward Hirsch
#50. I sang in the coffee houses of the country in the early '60s with no idea of success in terms of records or television. I just thought I was a storyteller. I didn't even think of myself as a singer.
Judy Collins
#51. The most powerful person in the world is the story teller.
The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda
of an entire generation that is to come.
Steve Jobs
#52. I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
Oliver Sacks
#53. A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale," I said. "But she's naked and the storyteller's hands are all over her.
Glen Duncan
#54. Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Douglas Coupland
#55. I've been a storyteller all my life. When I was in high school, I used to amuse myself by driving through the woods at night and see how long it would be before I scared the pants off my friends - and if I could do it before I scared myself.
Patricia Briggs
#56. I close my eyes. I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words.
Francesca Lia Block
#57. I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.
Deborah Harkness
#58. Magician is the best storyteller in the world.
Amit Kalantri
#59. I don't want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.
Ashwin Sanghi
#60. Be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.
Sol Stein
#61. I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.
James Cameron
#62. I'm a storyteller, and there's some genres I like. I don't think I'm ever going to do science fiction, but I want to do a musical one day. I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.
Spike Lee
#63. There are so many versions of every story because every storyteller tells the story differently.
Tomm Moore
#64. Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.
Abbas Kiarostami
#65. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?
John Irving
#66. Hi. My name is Debby, and I am a storyteller. I don't think of myself as an actress. I am more like a face that takes words on a page, and puts them in front of your eyes.
Debby Ryan
#67. My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.
Chris Ware
#68. In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.
Garth Stein
#69. I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.
P.J. Harvey
#70. It's about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it's Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it's going to be, 'Storyteller.'
Gary Vaynerchuk
#72. Never follow a story with a question, Maisie, not immediately. And remember to acknowledge the storyteller, for in some way even the messenger is affected by the story he brings.
Jacqueline Winspear
#73. But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.
Madeleine L'Engle
#74. I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.
Charlie Hunnam
#75. I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'
James Patterson
#76. Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time - very inspiring and dramatic.
Bat For Lashes
#77. I didn't want to be a storyteller when I grew up; I wanted to be stuntman.
Chris Milk
#78. I think the whole concept behind lyrics is you better mean what you say, or you should like, become a storyteller. I mean, there's a lot of bands who are just storytellers, and then there are bands who actually have something valid to say. And the bands who have valid points are few and far between.
Kirk Hammett
#79. I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.
Sebastiao Salgado
#80. Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share.
Patricia Hickman
#83. I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.
Jackie Collins
#84. I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories.
Henry Rollins
#85. No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it's the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.
Josh Radnor
#86. Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.
Karen Abbott
#87. Brandon Sanderson is the real thing-an exciting storyteller with a unique and powerful vision. ELANTRIS is one of the finest debuts I've seen in years.
David Farland
#88. When rumours fly, when false tales are being told, be the storyteller.
Bernard Cornwell
#89. I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky.
Jane Fonda
#90. If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?
Lloyd Alexander
#91. My mother is the best storyteller. And her mother was too.
Marian Keyes
#92. Not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always.
Jacqueline Carey
#93. Know, Goodwife, that Faerie is shaped by storytellers. Their fantasies, their dreams give my realm life. We were dying, all of us, from the smallest nixie to highborn sidhe, for want of a storyteller.
Eugie Foster
#94. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can't be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.
Alan Garner
#95. I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.
Roy Conli
#97. First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller.
Terence Winter
#98. I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller,
the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered-
as a storyteller. A good storyteller.
Louis L'Amour
#99. We divide the roles of mystic, doctor, therapist, artist, herbalist, naturalist, and storyteller into separate, often inimical professions. In most other societies, there was one word, one job assignment, for somebody who was all these things at once.
Martha N. Beck
#100. As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business. I am a storyteller. Daydreaming is the best part of my job.
Richelle E. Goodrich
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