Top 100 Storyteller Quotes
#1. I don't mind UFO's and ghost stories, it's just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.
Robert Stack
#2. All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something.
Michael Kimmelman
#3. William Kowalski is the kind of storyteller you don't see quite enough these days. The yarn spinner with a generous soul. The Hundred Hearts is a moving, humane adventure about the price of personal connections and the costs of sacrifice. I tore through this bad boy in two short nights.
Victor LaValle
#4. The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.
Dinty W. Moore
#5. Any military man will tell you that the way to pull two divided groups together is to give them a common enemy. This is what Hitler did, when he came to power in 1933 as chancellor.
Jodi Picoult
#6. Our stories are the tellers of us. -Little Bee
Chris Cleave
#7. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
William Trevor
#8. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
Chris Cleave
#9. I am a storyteller from a personal viewpoint. When I run out of people I invent ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts. Never saw one.
Ruskin Bond
#10. Asking storytellers to be genuine is like, asking a chain smoker to quit smoking . Habit of lying isn't easy to fix. Pretend as believing is like selling cigarettes. What else we could do, if we want them to be in our lives ...
Heshan Udunuwara
#11. Writer? Author? Storyteller, that's what I decided to be.
Robert McCammon
#12. I am a storyteller, spiraling fantasy and reality into mystical tales. That eerie space between fact and fiction, where only the brightest light can scare the shadows - you will find me there.
Sara Frost
#13. I'm definitely musician and storyteller. But I always like to take an active role in things I care about socially and environmentally.
Ben Sollee
#14. Abel was brushing the snow off his parka while Micha was dancing around him, still balancing the plate of cookies, singing, 'We're staying, we're staying, we're staying overnight! We're drying! We're drying! We're drying on the line!
Antonia Michaelis
#16. Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don't want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.
Hugh Jackman
#17. Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.
Melissa Rosenberg
#18. Robert Louis Stevenson ... was a storyteller, that's what I'd like to be, that's what I'm trying to be
Quintin Jardine
#20. I think I have probably adjusted the way I see the world, I interpret the world and I communicate the world into book format simply because of this familiarity. Possibly in another society and another context I might have been a storyteller or who knows what.
Jackie French
#21. I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story.
John Le Carre
#22. 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
#24. I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, on who is half hacker, half bard.
Janet H. Murray
#25. A good storyteller minces words to entertain or inspire the audience. The politicians and religious leaders do much the same, but for a different purpose - to turn otherwise normal people to nutcases.
Vinko Vrbanic
#26. Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.
Joss Whedon
#27. As a storyteller, I appreciate a great tale. As a cat lover, I appreciate a great tail.
Jarod Kintz
#28. From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.
Toni Morrison
#29. (LBJ) had what a journalist calls "a genius for analogy" - made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller. Master of the senate
Robert A. Caro
#30. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.
Roxane Gay
#31. Empathy is, first of all, an act of imagination, a storyteller's art
Solnit, Rebecca
#32. I've grown as a storyteller, and my comedic timing has gotten better.
Melissa De Sousa
#33. Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
#35. 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
#36. Perhaps it's chasing me. But I don't think it will ever catch me because I am moving fast.
Roald Dahl
#37. Because I sensed in him the magic of a poet, a storyteller who can bind you with tales of things that had never been and could never be. And I felt myself so bound. Pulled under. At a loss for breath in his presence, just as I once was in a river, clinging to life.
Stephanie Dray
#39. Theatre has been a part of my life since before I can remember - my dad is also an actor and a director and a storyteller who lives and works in the Twin Cities; my mom is a nurse practitioner, but she also grew up doing theatre - so, it has always been a part of my experience.
Seth Numrich
#40. Everyone has a story within them, let yours out.
C.J. Heath
#41. As a visual storyteller, a lot is learning what to include so you're not being redundant between images and text.
Nate Powell
#42. For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.
Robert Littell
#43. As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.
Marshall Curry
#44. I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'
Ken Follett
#45. Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric Hoffer
#46. I am very fortunate in that I have spent pretty much my whole life being a writer, and before I was a writer, I was a storyteller.
Isobelle Carmody
#47. 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
#48. If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller.
Austin Kleon
#49. People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not."
"Shouldn't the storyteller believe it."
"The storyteller should tell it.
Cecelia Ahern
#50. The more forcibly I'm made aware of the fact that I'll never be the kind of storyteller I most admire, the less I'll be troubled by that. I'll probably just become more myself.
Helen Oyeyemi
#51. At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.
Anne Lamott
#52. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin
#53. I am a storyteller and a researcher, and I'm sorry the world has a hard time straddling the tension of those two things, but that's who I am.
Brene Brown
#54. The storyteller is one who comes bearing a great and lasting gift.
Edward Eggleston
#55. What storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.
Erica Jong
#56. I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.
Salman Rushdie
#57. Sane, reasonable, play-it-safe people are not sufficiently engaged in life to generate great stories. Instead, they sit back and wait for a leader-storyteller to come along and get them caught up in a life worth living.
Dan B. Allender
#58. I've always used the technique of the cuento. I am an oral storyteller, but now I do it on the printed page. I think if we were very wise we would use that same tradition in video cassettes, in movies, and on radio.
Rudolfo Anaya
#59. I'm not a good storyteller. I always think I'm going to get interrupted, or something's going to get edited. I think that comes from being in a large family, so you have to get your story in really quick or someone cuts you off.
Amy Sedaris
#60. Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#61. I'm a storyteller - that's my chamber, that's my box. I'm always tryin' to give you the best story from our side of the table that you could really relate to quick. I understand where I wanna be at, but sometimes the production takes me where I need to go.
Raekwon
#62. The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice, his job is to shed light, and not to master
Robert Hunter
#64. I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own.
Craig Finn
#65. I am not a storyteller ... not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.
Kate Morton
#66. We give violent movies a pass but come down hard on a rapper like Scarface, who is ultimately a storyteller just like Brian de Palma. And neither of them is responsible for the poverty and violence that really do shape people's lives
not to mention their individual choices.
Jay-Z
#67. I remember one review of The Office Christmas Special that compared it unfavourably to Dickens. What? You're saying I'm not as good as the greatest storyteller ever. Boo! Boo! I think I can live with that.
Ricky Gervais
#68. When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.
Barry Levinson
#69. Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.
Danny Huston
#70. But now I'm thinking that wanting to end up with a great storyteller might have been a bad idea. Because girls who can tell great stories are also great liars.
Lauren Barnholdt
#71. As a storyteller, you also don't want to make people feel like they're left out, like other people who have read the book have an interior knowledge of this show, and the degree of difficulty in watching it is much higher.
Damon Lindelof
#72. I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.
Tanith Lee
#73. I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination.
Jodi Picoult
#74. You are a born storyteller," said the old lady. "You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.
A.S. Byatt
#75. The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses.
Antonia Michaelis
#77. I was never taken to a play or concert or church. Yet I was a show-off, a dreamer, a storyteller.
Ralph Waite
#78. Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots.
John Crowley
#79. I am not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do. No mystique.
Alistair MacLean
#80. I'm not a good storyteller - I much prefer to be with people who are chatty, to have the luxury of listening.
Conor McPherson
#81. I'm excited about becoming a transmedia storyteller. The idea that we can tell the 'Agent Mom' story online with MTV Comics and build a fan base that we can take over to Paramount to discuss turning that story it into a movie is just awesome.
Alaina Huffman
#82. David Corbett's The Art of Character offers a deep inquiry into the creation of character for the novice writer, with valuable nuggets of wisdom for the seasoned storyteller. If you are a writer, it should be on your desk.
Jacqueline Winspear
#83. Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.
James Robertson
#84. You're a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."
"Beautiful and full of monsters?"
"All the best stories are.
Laini Taylor
#85. The truth is, I'm a storyteller. And it scares me, because my training as an academic is that the more accessible you are and the more human you are, the less smart you are. It's a shame trigger for me to be honest.
Brene Brown
#86. I think the actor has a tribal role as the archetypal story teller. I think there was a time when the storyteller, the priest, the healer, were all one person in one body. That person used to weave stories at night around a small fire to keep the tribe from being terrified that sun had gone down.
Ben Kingsley
#87. No one could say the stories were useless
for as the tongue clacked
five or forty fingers stitched
corn was grated from the husk
pathwork was pieced
or the darning was done ...
(from 'The Storyteller Poems')
Liz Lochhead
#88. What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream.
Laini Taylor
#89. I approach film no differently than I approach a role. I want to make sure the movie is right, the characters are right, I can really bring something to it as a visionary, a storyteller. It's great to point a camera, but can you tell a story?
Larenz Tate
#90. I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.
Robbie Robertson
#91. You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.
Douglas Adams
#92. Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.
Bruce Dickinson
#93. The storyteller has the power to make people feel good or bad about themselves. The storyteller has the
Sister Souljah
#94. Growing up, I loved Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart. They are a big reason I'm a storyteller because they are two of the best.
Henry Cho
#95. That's a very real feeling - that I don't have a story to tell. I'm not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.
Aaron Sorkin
#96. For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it'll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.
Robin McKinley
#97. I'm not an aspiring young actor; I'm a storyteller who made it late in life, and I'm therefore an inspiration to everyone who thinks that, at 23, if you're not in the Backstreet Boys, then you're never gonna make it.
Paul Hogan
#98. I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.
Sara Paretsky
#99. I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.
John Irving
#100. In this time of 'information overload', people do not need more information. They want a story they can relate to.
Maarten Schafer
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