1,265 Quotes About Storytelling

Societies continuously try to recreate themselves — shared holidays, shared news, shared traditions, shared language, shared music, shared myths, shared victories, and shared griefs. Shared origins… So by telling each other stories, we recreate ourselves over and over again. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Who are our heroes? Who are the villains? These stories pass our values as a society from one generation to the next. It’s how we understand each other.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

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.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.