Tell The Story Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember a story.

John Wooden

#3. When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.

Dave Eggers

#4. You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.

Donald Miller

#5. My scars tell a story. They are a reminder of times when life tried to break me, but failed. They are markings of where the structure of my character was welded.

Steve Maraboli

#6. 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

#7. The filmmakers have a story they want to tell, and they go get the material they need for it. The film either exceeds or fails to meet up to their expectations or it's different.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#8. The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Paul Auster

#9. You are the poem I never knew how to write and this life is the story I have always wanted to tell.

Tyler Knott Gregson

#10. Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.

T.C. Boyle

#11. The Irish tell the story of a man who arrives at the gates of heaven and asks to be let in St. Peter says, "Of course, just show us your scars." The man says, "I have no scars". St. Peter says, "What a pity was there nothing worth fighting for"?

Martin Sheen

#12. The story I tell is so incomplete, five kids in the house and no food to eat.

Too $hort

#13. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

#14. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

Ira Sachs

#15. When I make movies, I don't ever go out there to please anyone other than myself. I never try to make a film for the masses. I just try to tell my story.

Lee Daniels

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. There is a story I always tell my students ... when I came for the 1st time to the US. I didn't speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word "exit" which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :"No wonder Americans are winners ,every door they open leads to success

Pablo

#19. Dumb luck brought on the move from business to acting. I had moved to New York when I was 23, in the year 2000. On a lark, I went to audition for a soap opera. I thought, 'Hey, this will be a really fun story to tell my grandkids one day, that I auditioned for a soap!'

Teddy Sears

#20. Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.

Javier Perez De Cuellar

#21. 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

#22. It's basically taking a 911 call, bringing them on stage and dealing with it just like when I was a Chicago policeman for 12 years. I personally become involved. Where Jerry lets people tell their story and lets everything happen on stage, I kind of go after the bad guy and protect the little guy.

Steve Wilkos

#23. This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.

Ann Hood

#24. Keep in mind that the only person to write for is yourself.Tell the story you most desperately want to read.

Susan Isaacs

#25. If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

Lewis Hine

#26. Don't go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat - tell it to me.

Pat Conroy

#27. 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

#28. If your life is a blank page, that only means you have room to write your story. You have the power to tell that story the way you want to.

Thea Harrison

#29. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

#30. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

Salman Rushdie

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. The biggest problem is that people want to tell the whole story, and they write letters that are way longer than anything I could possibly run.

Emily Yoffe

#35. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.

Joss Whedon

#36. That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C.S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up.

Seanan McGuire

#37. My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day.

Meg Cabot

#38. I was working at a restaurant in L.A. when a producer came in. He said I should audition for this movie 'Cellular.' I did, and I got the part. It actually makes me sick to tell that story because it's obnoxious.

Mircea Monroe

#39. She seemed to Bond to give a quick involuntary shrug of the shoulders as she spoke, but then she leant impulsively towards him. 'I have some news for you from Mathis. He was longing to tell you himself. It's about the bomb. It's a fantastic story.

Ian Fleming

#40. I always wanted to tell the story of how Pearl Jam is the story of lightning striking twice. As well as being the flipside of the classic rock tale where great promise ends in tragedy. This is where tragedy begins great promise.

Cameron Crowe

#41. 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

#42. I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

Isabel Allende

#43. Whenever I work on a film, I have three rules. Only three and I tell them to every screenwriter. I say let's retain the spirit and the intent of the overall story. Let's make it the best film that we possibly can.

Nicholas Sparks

#44. When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

Miles Davis

#45. If there's no one else to tell another side - the only story that can be told is the story that becomes true. (p. 173)

Heidi W. Durrow

#46. 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

#47. If we can find someone who has earned the right to hear our story, we need to tell it. Shame loses power when it is spoken. In this way, we need to cultivate our story to let go of shame, and we need to develop shame resilience in order to cultivate our story.

Brene Brown

#48. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.

Elizabeth Held Forsyth

#49. I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?

Peter Orner

#50. I tell ya! The road to success is an endless battle for you and me.

Steven Jackson

#51. My mother used to tell this corny story about how the doctor smacked me on the behind when I was born and I thought it was applause, and I have been looking for it ever since.

Kathy Bates

#52. You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyper-intelligent pandimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research program ... . Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time.

Douglas Adams

#53. 'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.

David S.Goyer

#54. There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Richard Linklater

#55. The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

Nick Earls

#56. The chief thing is desire. You've really got to want to do it, you've really got to want to tell that story. And you have to be able to set goals for yourself to get it done.

F. Paul Wilson

#57. My mother always said, 'The best way to ruin a story is to tell the other side.'

Gordon Smith

#58. When Cecily comes to sit beside me, we rest our heads together and I tell her a final story about the twins. The one whose grief drove him to set the country ablaze. And the one who found a way to love her captor.

Lauren DeStefano

#59. 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

#60. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

Roger Kahn

#61. Pictures couldn't tell the whole story anyway. That was the other thing about them - they were always a carefully edited glimpse, a story out of context.

Sarah Ockler

#62. I always believed that the picture itself should tell the story.

Brian Froud

#63. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#64. When you tell a story you automatically talk about traditions, but they're never separate from the people, the human implications. You're talking about your connections as a human being.

Gayl Jones

#65. It's never too late to tell a good story, to create a new myth that rouses us from our intoxicated slumber, that lifts us above the din of confusion and arms us against the weapons of mass distraction.

Derek Rydall

#66. It's actually a rather romantic and dramatic story
one I would eagerly tell you, except for the fact that I recently forgot it, based on it being far too long and having not enough decapitations.

Brandon Sanderson

#67. What the artist attempts to do is to try and tell a story. Attempting to give physical expression to a story that's internal.

Gregory Crewdson

#68. If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.

Brian K. Vaughan

#69. All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.

Spike Lee

#70. That song is a story that shows how easily you could get slipped into being labeled as the bad guy, even though what you really trying to do is tell the bad guy to leave you alone.

Slick Rick

#71. Why would you save me?
Because you, mouse, can tell Gregory a story. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.'
- A Tale of Despereaux, Kate Dicamillo - P. 81

Kate DiCamillo

#72. I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.

Patrick Ness

#73. If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

Horace Mann

#74. Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn't come easy to everybody. It's a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

Austin Kleon

#75. If someone knows me and likes me or my work, they're more likely to allow me to tell their story. But it also cuts the other way.

Anderson Cooper

#76. Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It's not cinema; it's not literature; it's just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.

Marjane Satrapi

#77. I don't write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story.

Desmond Dekker

#78. The funny thing is, whenever I'm working on something, I kind of forget there's a lot of people watching. It makes it easier to be in the moment and to tell a story as well as possible.

Michiel Huisman

#79. It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

Rob Reiner

#80. You set out to tell a good story. You don't do it because there is a deep message involved because the movie is almost always bad when you do that.

John Lee Hancock

#81. You see so many movies ... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

Peter Bogdanovich

#82. There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

Julia Glass

#83. When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.

Romola Garai

#84. This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called 'Gurgeh'. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game. Me? I'll tell you about me later. This is how the story begins.

Anonymous

#85. Now go into the world and tell this story.

M O Walsh

#86. So when you tell a joke, you want to make someone laugh, or if you tell a story about someone who had a heart attack, it may be because you want the listener to exercise. Stories are tools to create social cohesion and to get humans to strategize together.

Peter Guber

#87. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.

Fanny Howe

#88. But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

Kevin Spacey

#89. People like to come up to me and tell me that I've got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren't just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system.

CM Punk

#90. I've done a lot of theater, and I know that it's a different audience each time who doesn't know the story, and we have to tell it.

Courtney B. Vance

#91. Tom said, "Let me beg you never to tell that story to Will. He'd have you locked up." "But the house wasn't worth what I asked!" "I repeat what I said about Will. What's Adam want with your house?" "He's going to move there. Wants the twins to go to school in Salinas." "What'll

John Steinbeck

#92. In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.

Joseph Heller

#93. You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

Ann Beattie

#94. 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

#95. What I usually do is tell funny stories from the road, many of which are, of course, unprintable. But I don't actually have a joke. I don't tell jokes much. I tell little stories.

Howard Dean

#96. The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.

Robert Carlyle

#97. Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.

Shannon Hale

#98. I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

#99. Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.

Ellen Hopkins

#100. You're the best bad decision I ever made, and you are, by far, my favorite story to tell.

Jay Crownover