1,265 Quotes About Storytelling

Is this a kissing book?

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

Maybe if people can't have an end to their suffering, the next thing they seek for is to know why they suffer. Suffering is a part of life in this world, part of a cycle....Stories give you a way to see things. A way to understand the events of your life. Even if you don't realize it while you're hearing the tale.

To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.

When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins.

people don't really want original stories. they want different versions of the same story. this is called meta-narrative.

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 

I think if a story has a message it should be incidental and accidental, otherwise it leans too close to indoctrination.

Abaya?!'Sayid was so surprised, and it seemed to me that I had said too much. Probably, it was the astonishment of a Muslim who could not imagine a Christian woman wearing abaya.'Sayid, do you believe me?