Telling Stories Quotes

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time. ~ Agnes Varda

I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture. ~ Holly Hunter

I want to be scared. I want to keep taking insane risks. I want to be scared because you're going to grow through that whether you want to or not. I don't want to play the same guy. I want to keep throwing curveballs to you guys and keep telling stories. ~ Taylor Kitsch

I love telling stories from a kid's point of view because they don't really see all the obstacles in front of them. They're resilient, and sometimes adults can steal that from them. ~ George Tillman, Jr.

My favorite monster has always been the zombie. They are so much fun. They can be scary, pathetic, sad, funny, tragic, even heroic. They are the most elastic monster because, even with all of that, they don't interfere with telling stories about the humans. They serve as threats and metaphors, but they allow the story to be about people. ~ Jonathan Maberry

There wasn't much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things. ~ George Lucas

I'm not against people just being funny or telling stories. I don't need to delve into the soft, dark core all the time. If it happens, it happens. ~ Marc Maron

We need art. We've been telling stories since the beginning. As human beings, we need it for our survival. ~ Lili Taylor

Every story needs to be worth telling. ~ Vera Nazarian

Not only truth can set you free, but forgiveness as well. ~ Auliq Ice

I want to continue to make beautiful movies. The most important thing is to be a part of beautiful stories, that's all I want. So I don't care if it's a Hollywood movie or an independent movie or a Spanish or American movie. I care about telling stories. ~ Melanie Laurent

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid. ~ Rabih Alameddine

This is what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. ~ John Green

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people. ~ Susanna Kearsley

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me. ~ Kate Grenville

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening. ~ Carmen Agra Deedy

Comedy, it's a way for me to keep my acting chops. It's like a free acting class, to get up in front of a live audience. You get to have fun telling stories. ~ Gabrielle Dennis

However it ends, at least you had a story to tell. ~ Jay Kristoff

I love telling stories, whether I'm the human instrument that helps tell that story, or I'm the man behind the curtain. ~ Ray McKinnon

I guess telling stories is an art. I never looked at it that way. I just started talking, and everyone started laughing. So I kept talking, and they kept laughing. ~ Art Donovan

The brain stays up all night telling stories while we sleep. We just call them dreams. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

Yes, it's all different," he said.
"You're going to be very surprised."
But I wasn't thinking of that. I only
wanted to hold him. "Listen," he said,
"I miss that too.
And now you'll be telling stories
of my coming back
and they won't be false, and they won't be true,
but they'll be real."
And then, as he used to, he said, "Let's go!"
And we walked down the beach together. ~ Mary Oliver

Acting and singing are actually very similar because they're both telling a story. ~ Jackie Evancho

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories. ~ Don Roff

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic. ~ Edward Zwick

It's a director's job to tell a story and he's very well versed in telling stories with a bit of comedy in them and keeping the pace of the movie right and that's exactly what he did. He was observant of a world he didn't understand but he told a wonderful story. ~ Cuba Gooding, Jr.

I feel like I'm selling something nobody want to buy. Something big and stinky, like Kiki Brown and her lemon smell-good polish. But what really makes me and Kiki the same is, I'm proud a what I'm selling. I can't help it. We telling stories that need to be told. ~ Kathryn Stockett

I went up on stage, and said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? To check out the chicks." I was a genius at 10. Try telling that at 21, and you look hacky and stupid. That was the only joke I've ever told. Everything since has been character voices, doing impressions or just telling stories. ~ Gabriel Iglesias

That was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny. ~ John Green

Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell as tory without transforming it in some way; it is part of the magic of storytelling. Like the troubadors of the past, who hid their messages in poems, songs and fairy tales, I too would hide my true purpose [ ... ]
It was by telling stories that I would save myself. ~ Kate Forsyth

A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories ... the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound. ~ Lucy O'Brien

Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those
in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists ... ~ Joseph Brodsky

I don't shy from controversy. I'm telling stories, and I'll tell whatever story seems like it wants to be told. ~ Lauren Myracle

Telling stories on behalf of brands is what I've done all my life. ~ Lee Clow

I was very fortunate that a teacher saw that I read a lot and got bored very easily and had a lot of energy, so she said, 'You've got to go to this youth theater.' I joined Manchester Youth Theatre when I was really young, and I just loved putting on and being involved in plays and telling stories. ~ Justin Chadwick

She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off. ~ Lauren Groff

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music. ~ Anthony Davis

My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do. ~ Ken Scott

Our refuge is being exactly where we are - not dramatizing problems by replaying them in our heads, telling stories to our friends, eliciting sympathy and convincing ourselves that this is a very big deal. Our refuge is in the stillness of being the compassionate witness to our panic and fear - not judging it as good or bad, just accepting the what is of the moment. ~ Charlotte Kasl

I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same. ~ Peter Landesman

Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories. ~ William Gibson

I feel like in telling stories, there are the things the audience thinks are important, and then there are the things that are actually important. ~ J.J. Abrams

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He'd been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he'd grumble, patting his waistline. He'd only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail. ~ Aimee Bender

For as long as she can remember, telling stories has been her momma's gift to those around her, fables filled with rich, detailed accounts of gods and monsters, of love and curses. She can weave a tale from Spanish moss and moonlight that will make a young girl's heart resonate with yearning or weep with anguish. Her coastal Georgia roots add a dark sweetness to all her narratives, one that stains her stories with sorrow like a drop of molasses dissolving in warm butter. ~ Sara Stark

I don't think it's going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories. ~ Dan Harmon

I really said, 'Okay, this is just the right job for me. This is really what I need to be doing: telling stories through music in lots of different styles of music.' ~ Christopher Lennertz

I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories. ~ Henry Rollins

Directing is one of my favourite things to do because I love telling stories and I love working with the individual artists and it's something that I really missed. ~ John Lasseter

I was tired of working in an office and I wanted to make a living telling stories. There are not many people who find a way to do this. ~ Nick Antosca

Even in traditional filmmaking, you're always trying to find novel ways of telling stories, and this is different. ~ Rick Heinrichs

I had just come off doing a lot of commercials when I did 'Go,' so a part of the fast pace and efficiency comes from the discipline I had to learn from telling stories in 25-second increments, and that type of discipline is insane. ~ Doug Liman

Walking, talking, reading, drawing, praying, telling stories: the nourishment is there, as close as our own breath. We only have to pause a moment, notice, and enjoy. ~ Christian McEwen

When a friend needs consoling, do not give in to the temptation of telling stories similar to theirs of disaster or bereavement. It is something people often do to show empathy but nothing is more tiresome than other people's problems when you want to focus on your own. Listening is by far the best form of consolation. ~ Giles Andreae

I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters. ~ Georgie Henley

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game ... is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood. ~ Carlos Fuentes

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. ~ Ben Okri

Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way. ~ Jay-Z

Everyone sleeps, except lovers, who stay awake, telling stories to God ~ Rumi

As an artist, I am interested in telling stories that haven't been told before, stories that are going to affect people, and also stories that shine light on areas of history that haven't had light shined on them before. ~ Naomie Harris

Listening to others does not mean you should sound like them; find your own voice by telling stories as authentically as possible. ~ Carmen Agra Deedy

The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that? ~ Michael Chabon

Halfway through the meal, while we were all laughing and telling stories, I made the mistake of placing my hand on Kaidan's upper thigh without thinking.
He let out a groan loud enough to silence the room. I slipped my hand back into my own lap, and Kaidan cleared his throat.
"Wow," he said. "The corn pudding is fantastic."
I snorted, which started a round of snickers. Patti smiled at Kaidan like he was a precious boy.
"Isn't it good? Anna found the recipe a few years ago. She's a great cook."
"Mm-hm." Kaidan gave a tight-lipped smile. "That she is. ~ Wendy Higgins

I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories. ~ Gregory Maguire

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I know you're always supposed to want more of everything. But in truth, I'm having a nice ebb and flow of being in my daughter's life every day and getting to keep my work life alive. I'm not nominated for ten thousand everythings every minute, but I am acting and telling stories I love. ~ Helen Hunt

You're telling stories again. You have the disease of telling stories, Roland. ~ Imraan Coovadia

When women get together, they tell stories. This is how it has always been. Telling stories is our way of saying who we are, where we have come from, what we know, and where we might be headed. ~ Jalaja Bonheim

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination
and therefore fiction
is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I once dreamt I was telling stories and felt someone patting my foot in encouragement. I looked down and saw that I was standing on the shoulders of an older woman who was steadying my ankles and smiling up at me.
I said to her, "no no come stand on my shoulders, For you are old and I am Young."
"No no" she insisted, "this is the way it is supposed to be." I saw that she stood on the shoulders of a woman far older than she, who stood on the shoulders of a woman even older, who stood on the shoulders of a woman in robes, who stood on the shoulders of another soul, who stood on the shoulders... ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother ("in the loving calm of your arms," says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.
Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.) ~ Roland Barthes

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives. ~ George Saunders

I've always liked telling stories. That probably came from my dad, who definitely had the gift of gab and who wove a kind of personal folklore about his youth - stories full of adventure and ghosts and wild antics. ~ Cullen Bunn

Telling stories has been a compulsion of mine since I could physically say, 'Once upon a time ... ' But in high school, I realized I could study creative writing in college and actually pursue it as a viable career. ~ Victoria Aveyard

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors. ~ Colm Meaney

The Marvel cinematic universe and the Marvel animation universe are things that are very true, in terms of the DNA of what it is. But if, at the end of the day, all we're doing is telling stories that have appeared in the comic books already, then we're not really challenging anybody. ~ Jeph Loeb

I hope telling stories though 'Making a Difference' - as in my academic work and nonprofit work - will help me to live my grandmother's adage of 'Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you.' ~ Chelsea Clinton

Acting is so much fun. It is a different ball game and I want to concentrate on that at the moment. I'm really passionate about what I do. I love entertainment and telling stories to people and I am very lucky that I am doing what I want to do. ~ Britney Spears

It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend.

The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences.

I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my ~ Masha Gessen

If I had not been successful as a director, then I'm sure I would still be telling stories. I would have continued on 16mm or found a different medium through which to tell them. ~ Pedro Almodovar

I would definitely not rule out doing television, because I think it's a great medium for telling stories. ~ Chris Pratt

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now. ~ Tim Walker

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually. ~ Asif Kapadia

When I ask my parents, it's incredibly obvious I was going to have a creative career at an early age. I've been forever telling stories since I was very young. ~ Sophie Kennedy Clark

I just think, as a species, what we [people] enjoy most is creation and creativity, and telling stories is an extension of expressing all the thoughts and ideas that we have inside of ourselves. ~ Seth Gabel

It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I feel very privileged that I get to spend my life telling stories that mean something to people. ~ Mary Stuart Masterson

You know," King said, "I'm not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it's not; it's the reason I write them down. ~ Stephen King

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. ~ Barry Lopez

I've always loved books. My mother told me that before I could talk, I'd babble in my crib as I turned the pages of my little cloth books, apparently telling stories to go along with the pictures. ~ JoAnn Ross

Eight Bells: Robert J. Kane '55D died June 3, 2017, in Palm Harbor, Florida. He came to MMA by way of Boston College. Bob or "Killer," as he was affectionately known, was an independent and eccentric soul, enjoying the freedom of life. After a career at sea as an Officer in the U.S. Navy and in the Merchant Marine he retired to an adventurous single life living with his two dogs in a mobile home, which had originally been a "Yellow School Bus." He loved watching the races at Daytona, Florida, telling stories about his interesting deeds about flying groceries to exotic Caribbean Islands, and misdeeds with mysterious ladies he had known. For years he spent his summers touring Canada and his winters appreciating the more temperate weather at Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg, Florida…. Enjoying life in the shadow of the Sunshine Bridge, Bob had an artistic flare, a positive attitude and a quick sense of humor. Not having a family, few people were aware that he became crippled by a hip replacement operation gone bad at the Bay Pines VA Hospital. His condition became so bad that he could hardly get around, but he remained in good spirits until he suffered a totally debilitating stroke. For the past 6 years Bob spent his time at various Florida Assisted Living Facilities, Nursing Homes and Palliative Care Hospitals. His end came when he finally wound up as a terminal patient at the Hospice Facility in Palm Harbor, Florida. Bob was 86 years old when he passed. He will be missed…. ~ Hank Bracker

Catch-22 exemplifies the dilemma of rational actors caught up within the machinations of vast, irrational systems. Within such systems, even rational responses lead to irrational outcomes. The individual is aware of the irrationality but loses all power to act in their own interest. Faced with the roiling tide of information, we attempt to gain some kind of control over the world by telling stories about it: we attempt to master it through narratives. These narratives are inherently simplifications, because no one story can account for everything that's happening; the world is too complex for simple stories. Instead of accepting this, the stories become ever more baroque and bifurcated, ever more convoluted and open-ended. Thus paranoia in an age of network excess produces a feedback loop: the failure to comprehend a complex world leads to the demand for more and more information, which only further clouds our understanding - revealing more and more complexity that must be accounted for by ever more byzantine theories of the world. More information produces not more clarity, but more confusion. ~ James Bridle

Wrestling is a performance. Its entertainment, we [wrestlers] tell stories. We make our fans happy by telling stories but the long and short of it its pretty much the same thing as acting. ~ John Cena

A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories ... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't. ~ Aaron Huey

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I learned to tell stories from my mom. "Your dad's not feeling well today," she'd say. I had an accident. She'd say, Remember what happened. You're a clumsy girl. You walk into a door. You tripped and stumbled down a staircase. My favorite story: He doesn't mean to.
She was so good at telling stories that I started to believe them after a while. Maybe I was clumsy. Maybe it was my fault for provoking him.
Maybe he didn't really mean to. ~ Lauren Oliver

Well I'm not a storyteller, as far as telling stories which relate to experiences in my own life. That's not what I do. I write songs which have a narrative and attempt to make sense and tell a story - sure! But whenever I hear the word "storyteller" I think of a children's musician. ~ Freedy Johnston

I don't know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It's also changing how we're telling stories. ~ Keanu Reeves

That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

As a kid, I was always the jokester. I was telling stories at dinner and trying to make people laugh. I guess I've always just been naturally inclined to tell stories. ~ Wyck Godfrey