Top Storytelling Quotes

A tale spinner's goal is entertainment.

These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the telling...

Not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always.

A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy the story up but to tone it down. The fact is, the world is unbelievably strange and human behavior...

But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not...

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones,...

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll f...

We tell ourselves stories in order to live,

[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.

I said, 'Then whered the other story come from? . . .'He said, 'It come in to my mynd.'I said, 'You mean you made it up.'He said, 'Wel no I dint make it up you cant make up nothing in your head no mor...

Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends...

Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autob...

For at least twenty minutes, she handed out the story.

I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagan...

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.