Top 100 Telling A Story Quotes
#1. 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
#2. When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished.
James Patterson
#3. Just because I'm telling a story about a woman losing faith is not my rebellion against what I grew up in. If anything, it really affected the way I approached the story, and in fact, approach everything. I don't judge my characters.
Vera Farmiga
#4. I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.
Orhan Pamuk
#5. I suppose you could even argue that the very act of telling a story is an act of faith...
Kim Wright
#6. He felt himself go cold as he suddenly realized what a dangerous game he was playing. So this is the difference between telling a story and being in one, he thought numbly, the fear.
Patrick Rothfuss
#7. Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal.
Tom Hanks
#8. [Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck
'
[Opal] 'Was?'
[J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here.
Maria V. Snyder
#9. Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.
Wendell Berry
#10. Miracles, black, white, and grey all over. Like light on a wall, telling a story; like magic. Like cinema itself.
Gemma Files
#11. When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.
Howard Gordon
#12. There's nothing wrong with a male's point of view, obviously, but it's just a different way of telling a story.
Melanie Griffith
#13. I think film, to me, as a director, is about telling a story.
Donnie Yen
#14. When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.
Joshua Bell
#16. One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate - disgusting behavior!
Sei Shonagon
#17. We have no filter for music, but we feel it when what's being spoken and sung is telling a story and evidencing a character.
Marc E. Platt
#18. If you're telling a story, and somebody is going to come out badly, it better be you.
Rob Lowe
#19. Very quickly I realized that directing is a combination of things: It's visual, it's directing the actors, it's telling a story. And people don't always mention this part of directing, but it's also knowing how to really edit something into something that makes sense.
Julie Delpy
#20. Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket camera and put it on websites. I think that's where the most exciting kind of imagery and content is being recorded and exchanged today.
Jonas Mekas
#21. If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending.
John Hawkes
#22. The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
Penelope Lively
#23. I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.
Paul Bettany
#24. I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
Salman Rushdie
#25. We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.
Bradley Whitford
#26. There's nothing funny the first time about telling a story about getting beat up and it makes you leave high school.
Mike Birbiglia
#27. There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.
Steven Spielberg
#28. I'd say Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there's a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you're even telling a story.
Tim Story
#29. Telling a story is like playing a fiddle. No one want's to hear it when it's done badly
K.A. Young
#30. I have always believed that directing a film is like telling a story. You have to tell it well so that it is appreciated.
Anupam Kher
#31. I think as an actor you can feel when something's right and when something's resonating. I don't think that there's necessarily a right and a wrong. I think it's just a matter of being honest and telling a story.
Sadie Calvano
#32. I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.
Lars Von Trier
#33. When you're singing, it can be looked at as a monologue, in a way. If it's about telling a story and connecting with your audience, you can do that through song, through dialogue, or through a monologue. That's what's special about being an entertainer.
Naturi Naughton
#34. Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.
Sergio Aragones
#35. My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie.
Lee Daniels
#36. Telling a story is like sowing a seed - you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies.
Laila Lalami
#37. When telling a story about how wasted you were last night, stop.
Demetri Martin
#38. From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.
Joseph Boyden
#39. I can't say L'Etranger influenced me to write, but for the first time I considered the possibility of telling a story that resembled my own experiences in my own voice.
Sefi Atta
#40. Both Rick and Amelia were impressed with their graceful movements. The Balinese dance was artistic with great expression. The dancers seemed to be telling a story through their fingers, hands and body gestures, including head and eye movements. It was amazing. Every gesture was elegant.
Linda Weaver Clarke
#41. As a media member, my goal is to inform the American fans of persons of character. It's a joy for me, either writing a good story or telling a story on video.
Dominique Dawes
#42. I think that if you're serving yourself before you're serving a story then that's where you end up being not funny. It's not about being funny, it's about telling a story and then the comedy comes out of the situation, I think.
Zooey Deschanel
#43. I couldn't be happier teaming up to make the feature with a company as innovative as VICE. There is so much the world doesn't know about piracy in Somalia and the people involved, and I'm excited to be telling a story of piracy in Somalia from a different perspective.
Cutter Hodierne
#44. I'm just basically telling a story of my life.
Jose Canseco
#45. I don't ever want anything to come in the way of me truthfully telling a story.
Ian Somerhalder
#46. I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
P.G. Wodehouse
#47. That's the gift 'Precious' has given me. You really think you're telling a story about a fat black girl, and only fat black girls will understand it, and then you realize we're all Precious.
Lee Daniels
#48. I want to bring drawing back to the basics, make it about the pleasure that it can afford and remove the notion that it's some kind of precious or difficult activity. It's another way of telling a story.
Chris Riddell
#49. I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.
Anna Quindlen
#50. All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.
Elliot Ackerman
#51. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Martha Graham
#52. Whenever you're telling a story about true-life events and about real people, there's a tremendous responsibility-slash-burden to get it right.
Tom McCarthy
#53. When a woman wins an Oscar for telling a story from a woman's point of view, that's going to be the win. That's the moment.
Julie Davis
#54. Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.
Amanda Burton
#55. The idea of telling a story in reverse destabilises your ordinary moral reactions. That's one of the points of art - to challenge your preconceptions.
Vincent Cassel
#56. I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.
Jennifer Yuh Nelson
#57. Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
John Berger
#58. History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.
Donald Kagan
#59. Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.
Dennis Muren
#60. As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.
Rita Webb
#61. Every leader is telling a story ... about what he or she values.
Walt Disney
#62. Everyone is told to go to high school and get good grades and go to college and get good grades and then get a job and then get a better job. There's no one really telling a story about how they totally blew it, and they figured it out.
Sophia Amoruso
#63. I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.
Bill Hader
#64. Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.
Sam Shepard
#65. I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.
Chuck Palahniuk
#66. Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.
Antonio Damasio
#67. The strange thing about Christianity was that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.
J. Gresham Machen
#68. Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.
John Patrick Shanley
#69. I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
Henning Mankell
#70. I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
Chuck Palahniuk
#71. Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor's job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story.
Sylvester McCoy
#72. Acting and singing are actually very similar because they're both telling a story.
Jackie Evancho
#73. I know the responsibility that entails from telling a story. The one thing I despise the most is when I go to a movie and I see a whole bunch of lazy actors making me waste my time and money.
Zoe Saldana
#74. Authenticy in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.
Seth Godin
#75. When a bunch of stuff is happening on set, you have to remember the grander purpose: you're telling a story, so you have to get to that moment, and that takes supreme focus.
Taron Egerton
#76. I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.
Roger Zelazny
#77. And telling a story, I suppose, is like winding a skein of spun yarn- you sometimes lose track of the beginning.
Edith Pattou
#78. Gee-word?"
"Gods. What were you doin' the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?"
"Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger's balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.
Neil Gaiman
#79. Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self ... When acting, you're someone else.
Sabrina Carpenter
#80. 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
#81. I want to work with anyone who's passionate about telling a story. I obviously have a list of people I really love, but it's a really long list.
Matt Bomer
#82. For me, being in front of a camera is a matter of practicing and refining your art. I think, if you're telling a story worth telling, it's worth investing the time into developing.
Danny Pino
#83. The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.
Rashers Tierney
#84. Nobody knows this crime territory better than Mark Langan. His authentic experience proves that he is an expert in telling a story worth listening to. --Alex Kava, NY Times Bestselling Crime Novelist
Mark Langan
#85. When I was a kid I did impressions and funny voices a lot. When I was telling a story I would use the voices to make it more entertaining.
Gabriel Iglesias
#86. Telling a story that is consistent with everything that happened before,
Michael Lewis
#87. I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#88. Telling a story about something you know nothing about is like starting a new job without the training.
Joshua Hartzell
#89. Who doesn't want to be loved? That's the whole point. So, when you can get that from someone across the globe, for just telling a story, that's a special thing.
Charles Halford
#90. I'd say I'm the opposite of someone that has the urge to stand in front of strangers and make them laugh, but the idea of getting up and telling a story and people finding it amusing always appealed to me.
Eric Bana
#91. I work with gold that holds our past and diamonds that see the future and rubies that long for love. It's just a way of telling a story.
Waris Ahluwalia
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#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. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
