Top 100 Tell Story Quotes
#1. I have such pride in furthering the American musical and using it as a way to tell story.
Rachel Bloom
#2. The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
Salman Rushdie
#3. If this is a sad story, don't tell it to me tonight.'It is not sad,' she said. 'Only some things happen and are there for always even though you forget why or when.
Jean Rhys
#4. When I write, I'm looking to turn you on and tell a good story. No more, no less. No lofty goals here.
Kirsten McCurran
#5. 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
#6. We cannot bear for our most mysterious experiences to remain unexplained. I've therefore learned ... that every story has worth, since a person takes the time to tell it. The key is to listen.
Josh Gates
#7. 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
#8. Keep in mind that the only person to write for is yourself.Tell the story you most desperately want to read.
Susan Isaacs
#9. If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.
Lewis Hine
#10. I began to learn about the camera and the actors. That gave me a lot of the skills. At the same time, advertising gives you a lot of vices, for example, an obsession for a superficial look, but at the same time, it gives you the capacity to synthesize the story - tell a story in one minute.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#11. You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.
Kerry Washington
#12. I would say what was always on her[Harper Lee] mind was the stories she had to tell, and the story was pretty obvious in "To Kill A Mockingbird," maybe a bit - little bit less obvious and more obscure in "Go Set A Watchman."
Wayne Flynt
#13. Actors want to work. Give them characters they want to play, or a story they want to tell, and hopefully the budget will follow.
Lorene Scafaria
#14. I've done so many movies with first-time directors, and honestly I just go with gut instinct. People that usually can tell me a good story, and talk to me about why the movie is the movie they want to make. I just go with my gut.
Neal H. Moritz
#15. But hey, at least we'll have this strange story to tell, love and death and blood and daddy-issues. And holy crap, I'm a psychiatrist's wet dream.
Kendare Blake
#16. Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.
Adam Carolla
#17. Now go into the world and tell this story.
M O Walsh
#18. Life begins at 40 - but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
William Feather
#19. I looked like someone who'd had a night, and had a story to tell about it.
Morgan Matson
#20. Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I can't even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.
Ira Glass
#21. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
Samuel Beckett
#22. I love the grandiosity of Hollywood movies, and even in independents, I love the canvas you can tell your story on. I love fiction filmmaking, you really feel like you're creating something.
George Hickenlooper
#23. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different
Rohinton Mistry
#24. It could be seen as narcissistic to have your own museum, but for me, it's such a long time ago - I have perspective. That young man in the funny clothes - he's almost a stranger, so I can tell his story.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#25. if you want to convince children of the power of books, don't tell them stories are good. Tell them a good story.
Roger Sutton
#26. I think original voices get noticed. But most importantly, I think you should have a story to tell.
Chetan Bhagat
#27. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#28. Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.
Robert Patterson
#29. I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.
Christopher Nolan
#30. Tell me half a cup's worth of story and we'll call it a night.
Kelley Armstrong
#31. 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
#32. When you feel moved by the story, you want to tell that story.
James Wolk
#33. By accepting what the external structures have told us we need to do, we have given the power of our realities and ourselves to others. It is time to tell a new story for women, and that can only start with women.
Zainab Salbi
#34. I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell.
Kim Ji-woon
#35. The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.
Mike Nichols
#36. In my own life, I've written scripts that I want to direct, so I would love to take my own creativity in a way where I could tell my own story. That does inspire me, the idea of becoming a director.
Heather Graham
#37. I smile quietly. She is with me all the time. I feel stupid now, for not seeing it sooner. But hey, at least we'll have this strange story to tell, love and death and blood and daddy-issues. And holy crap, I am a psychiatrist's wet dream.- Cas Lowood, Anna Dressed in Blood
Kendare Blake
#38. I have noticed that when people tell their own stories, often it has less to do with wanting to communicate an idea to another than with clarifying an emotion to themselves. Or when the subject of the story is beloved and missing, as a way to make them here and alive.
Lydia Minatoya
#39. There are those nights where you are just so emotionally present that you crack yourself open. And it works. And on the nights when you don't have it in you because you're tired or you've got no voice, you still are able to do your job and tell the story that people have come to hear.
Staceyann Chin
#40. I believe you should tell the story of injustices, of inequalities, of bad conditions, so that the people as a whole in this country really face the problems that people who are pushed to the point of striking know all about, but others know practically nothing about.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#41. American shows can go on for 20 years. I respond more to the British format. Three seasons is a long run for them to tell a story.
Alia Shawkat
#42. All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
#43. The hardest part for me during the creation stage is actually putting words on paper that make sense and tell my story the way I see it. I sometimes feel I am slogging through quicksand when I write.
Linda Conrad
#44. I'm just trying to tell a nice story. Whether you're a writer or a producer, all you want to do is tell a good yarn.
Irwin Winkler
#45. We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.
Steve McCurry
#46. Even a killer needs to talk, to tell his life story, so bad he'll come and sit beside a grave or a rotting body and just blab, blab, blab at it for hours. Until he makes sense. Until the killer can convince himself with the story of his new reality. The reality that--he was right.
Chuck Palahniuk
#47. My dad came over to the house ... went into his pocket and pulled out a handful of money, and began to pass it out to the children ... This was the same man who, when I was his child, I would ask him for 50 cents, this man would tell me his life's story.
Bill Cosby
#48. I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
Jeanette Winterson
#49. If you're gonna tell your life story, you gotta be honest, or don't do it.
R. Kelly
#51. When I sit down to write, I don't think, 'OK, what is the next David O. Russell film I can write, or what is Harvey Weinstein going to want to buy?' Or even, 'What are filmgoers going to want.' I try to think, tell a good story. Just do what you do.
Matthew Quick
#52. There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.
Chris Raschka
#53. Everyone has degrees of madness in them, everyone has a story to tell.
Bryony Gordon
#54. I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story.
Steven Spielberg
#55. 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
#56. Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
Arundhati Roy
#57. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Alice Sebold
#58. Tell your story: Yes, tell your story. Show your example. Tell everyone it's possible, and others shall feel the courage, to climb their own mountains.
Paulo Coelho
#59. I'm working on a few different films and I'm just searching for the right new story to tell. As a director, you just have to kind of like just get through the first project before starting on the next one.
Joshua Michael Stern
#60. Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.
Elena Anaya
#61. Here's a story that I really want to tell about Bo Diddley at the OK corral.
Warren Zevon
#62. I have a story to tell to anyone who is willing to listen.
Samy Dib
#63. Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.
Lily King
#64. Although I use myself in my videos, I really see myself as a character. When I look at myself, when I sit and edit, I never think, "That's me." I think, "This is a character, and how do I edit this to tell a story?"
Laurel Nakadate
#65. I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.
Yann Martel
#66. I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.
James Herbert
#68. If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.
Matt Damon
#69. A good fiction writer can write any character or any story that she wants to write. The importance, IMO, is a burning desire to tell that person's story.
Suzanne Brockmann
#70. Each story has a different approach for me and I try to work with lighting that will tell you visually the story better than if it was shot in available light.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#71. I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
Simon Schama
#72. Everyone has a story to tell...Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.
Mimi Tulane
#73. I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?
Karen Allen
#74. I think if you're artistic in any way, you're probably born with it. I guess it's a talent that can be learned here and there, but I think the instinct to tell a story or to create something happens maybe in the womb.
Gabriel Macht
#75. Before I tell you my story," Jasper said. "you must understand that there are places in our world, Bella, where the life span of the never-aging is measured in weeks, and not centuries.
Stephenie Meyer
#76. We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.
Randall Kennedy
#77. I have said before that I'm not a a "curist" and I'm not an "ablist" but a "neutral" because I believe everyone has a story to tell without going to unhealthy extremes if we listened with our hearts we would learn about each others experiences.
Paul Isaacs
#78. Whenever I go to New York or any European country, they say: 'Nawal, why don't you get a facelift?' I tell them, 'I am proud of my wrinkles. Every wrinkle on my face tells the story of my life. Why should I hide my age?'
Nawal El Saadawi
#79. ... there is no greater way I can think of to honor those people who've died than to tell their story ...
Jamie Sobrato
#80. I will tell just one more story ... and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.
Primo Levi
#81. ( ... ) a director should tell a story that is close to his own existential experience.
Andrzej Wajda
#82. If I can build a coalition of people who are interested in what I have to say and what I'm thinking, I hope they'll come with me if I want to go tell a story that doesn't have dinosaurs in it - which I plan to do.
Colin Trevorrow
#83. 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
#84. Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can't. You're in a story and the body writing it is an asshole.
Catherynne M Valente
#86. I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
#87. I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
Umberto Eco
#88. For a long time, I was portrayed as the Osama bin Laden of the Internet, and I really wanted to be able to tell my side of the story. I wanted to be able to explain exactly what I did and what I didn't do to people who thought they knew me.
Kevin Mitnick
#89. We all spin stories. That's what we do. We want people to see certain things about us and not others. What matters is whether you let others in to the truest story, the one that's the hardest to tell.
Maya Lang
#90. It's not given even to the greatest writers to tell someone else's story.
Marty Rubin
#91. But that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too
Jack Kerouac
#92. I'm not sure what the moral is here ... I really just wanted to tell that story.
Tim Gunn
#94. Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.
Byron Katie
#95. I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.
Michael Frayn
#96. I feel like I barely survived Django (Unchained) emotionally - the violence, hearing the N-word every day. It cost me a lot psychologically, but it was worth it to tell that story.
Kerry Washington
#97. But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.
J.P. Delaney
#98. Some people say I appeared on the Phil Donahue show to tell 'my' sex change story but I've never appeared on his show for any reason ... not even as a member of the studio audience.
Eileen Davidson
#99. To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.
Rumer Godden
#100. Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.
Kevin Smith
