Top 100 Telling A Story Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer.
Cecelia Ahern
#5. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.
Sharon Salzberg
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.
Norman Mailer
#15. 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
#16. [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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#23. Everybody's got a different way of telling a story - and has different stories to tell.
Keith Richards
#24. Just as with the quartet, each part of a painting is telling a different story.
Guido Molinari
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I'm telling a Richard Pryor story through me.
Mike Epps
#29. 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
#30. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.
Judi Dench
#31. 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
#32. Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?
Yann Martel
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#37. Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.
Suzanne Collins
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Everything you're telling me was just a story, and now it's real.
Kathy Bryson
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The more personal you get, the more universal a story you end up telling.
Francesca Gregorini
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The music takes on all different jobs and hopefully is part of telling the story. Each song has to be a story unto itself. It's a very different set of muscles.
Frank Wildhorn
#69. Entrepreneurship is about telling a story that connects the deep needs of a group of people with a repeatable solution.
Evan Baehr
#70. I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.
Dario Argento
#71. At the core of investigative journalism is exactly the same thing that drives a page-turning thriller: telling a great story.
Hank Phillippi Ryan
#72. The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.
Sid Caesar
#73. A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.
Greg Rucka
#74. 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
#75. Designing the technical aspects of my camera movement for me is very important. I want the camera to be a big part in telling the story as well, like what I really believe in with all the films I make.
James Wan
#76. There's definitely a delicate line you have to walk in telling someone else's story that's not quite as delicate in telling your own story. I think when I'm working on a personal story, there's less pressure to try to get it exactly right.
Box Brown
#77. I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.
Andrea Riseborough
#78. Swimming has been a very effective medium for telling a story about the state of our planet.
Lewis Gordon Pugh
#79. A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman.
Thomas Hardy
#80. Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal.
Neel Burton
#81. Telling the story with only a few shots, I love that style. It makes you feel like you're part of the action, part of the story. It reminds me of the theater, where one act is basically like one long shot. It almost makes you forget that you're seeing a movie.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#82. When you're telling a story, the best stories, every character has an arc. Every one. And that arc is usually about finding yourself, or about at least finding something about yourself that you didn't know.
Roy Conli
#83. This is what life is about: seeing new places, meeting new people, grabbing life by the balls and squeezing until it coughs up a story worth telling.
Ruth Cardello
#84. Just telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made.
Jean Dujardin
#85. Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."
Philip Pullman
#86. And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.
Lee Gutkind
#87. To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato
for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius
without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity.
Muriel Barbery
#88. I hope telling the story of how I went from being a single mom to serving in the Texas State Senate to running for governor will remind others that with the right leadership in government, where you start has nothing to do with how far you go.
Wendy Davis
#89. If you tell the story you will live the story. If you live the story you have to own the story. If you dont like the story your living, stop telling it.
Virginia Johnston-Dodds
#90. I think people are tired of being slammed with foul language and sexual content that really has nothing to do with (telling a good story) ...
Shari Wiedmann
#91. Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#92. Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I'm telling my story as a political document.
Larry Kramer
#93. Allow others to talk about themselves instead of being obsessed about telling them or bragging about yourself and your possessions and achievements. Show a genuine interest in others and allow them to tell their story so you can share the conversation.
Archibald Marwizi
#94. I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me.
Jim Carrey
#95. Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.
Lauren Beukes
#96. In the South, we tell stories. We tell stories if you're in a sales position, if you're in a retail position, you lure your customer by telling a story. You just do.
Tate Taylor
#97. Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.
Rebecca Miller
#98. Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio.
Ira Glass
#99. I've never been a snob. It [movie] is just about stories. And I've never felt just because it's a big screen and you plop down your eight bucks that gives it a special meaning. It's just "Are you good at telling a story?"
Steven Soderbergh
#100. For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
Aimee Mann
