TOPICS

Story_Analysis

Storytelling

the_Story

world_building

SEE ALSO

rap

Story_Analysis

The_Heros_Journey

the_World

worldbuilding

AUTH

BOOKS

Infinite_Library

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

1.asak_-_Rise_early_at_dawn,_when_our_storytelling_begins

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT

0_1963-08-03

0_1969-02-19

1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP

1.asak_-_Rise_early_at_dawn,_when_our_storytelling_begins

Blazing_P1_-_Preconventional_consciousness

BS_1_-_Introduction_to_the_Idea_of_God

PRIMARY CLASS

Storytelling

subject

SIMILAR TITLES

Storytelling

TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE

bianwen. (變文). In Chinese, "transformation texts"; the earliest examples of Chinese vernacular writings, many drawing on prominent Buddhist themes. Produced during the Tang dynasty (c. seventh through tenth centuries), they were lost to history until they were rediscovered among the manuscript cache at DUNHUANG early in the twentieth century. The vernacular narratives of bianwen are probably descended from BIANXIANG, pictorial representations of Buddhist and religious themes. The Sinograph bian in both compounds refers to the "transformations" or "manifestations" of spiritual adepts, and seems most closely related to such Sanskrit terms as nirmAna ("magical creation" or "magical transformation," as in NIRMAnAKAYA) or ṚDDHI ("magical powers"). Bianwen were once thought to have been prompt books that were used during public performances, but this theory is no longer current. Even so, bianwen have a clear pedigree in oral literature and are the first genre of Chinese literature to vary verse recitation with spoken prose (so-called "prosimetric" narratives). As such, the bianwen genre was extremely influential in the evolution of Chinese performing arts, opera, and vernacular storytelling. Bianwen are primarily religious in orientation, and the Buddhist bianwen are culled from various sources, such as the JATAKAMALA, SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, and VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA. The genre does, however, include a few examples drawn from secular subjects. Bianwen may also have led to the development of later vernacular genres of literature with a religious orientation, such as the "treasure scrolls," or BAOJUAN.

Diyu bian[xiang]. (J. Jigoku hen[so]; K. Chiok pyon[sang] 地獄變[相]). In Chinese, "transformation tableaux of the hells"; pictorial representations of scenes from various hells, which were used as dramatic visual aids in storytelling and preaching. Often graphic and gory, these paintings depict the denizens of hells (NĀRAKA) as being variously devoured by beasts, boiled in cauldrons, inundated in rivers of blood, having their limbs amputated, etc. In East Asia, one of the earliest reported examples of this type of transformation tableaux (BIANXIANG) was in the form of paintings made on the walls of the Jingong monastery in 736 by the famous Tang-dynasty artist Wu Daozi. Legend has it that the sensationalized depictions of the hells in this transformation tableaux so shocked the butchers of the Tang capital that they all switched professions. See also AMITUO JINGTU BIAN; JINGTU BIAN.

jingtu bian. (J. jodohen; K. chongt'o pyon 淨土變). In Chinese, "transformation tableaux of the PURE LAND"; pictorial representations of scenes of the various pure lands. Found throughout East Asia, and discovered also at DUNHUANG and other Central Asian locations, these paintings are the counterparts of what are known as "transformation paintings" (BIANXIANG). Often used as diagrams (MAndALA) and dramatic visual aids for disseminating pure land ideas, these paintings are termed "transformations" (bian) possibly because they were meant to portray "animated" scenes to supplement storytelling and preaching. The transformation pictures of AMITĀBHA's pure land SUKHĀVATĪ were by far the most popular theme, although examples of the pure lands and abodes of VAIROCANA, BHAIsAJYAGURU, AVALOKITEsVARA, and MAITREYA were also known. See also AMITUO JINGTU BIAN and DIYU BIAN.

katha. :::speech; narration; fable; style of religious storytelling

KEYS (10k)

   1 Gary Gygax

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   17 Kurt Vonnegut
   9 Tanya Anne Crosby
   9 Gary Vaynerchuk
   9 Carmine Gallo
   7 Stephen King
   7 Malcolm Gladwell
   6 Salman Rushdie
   6 Kevin Spacey
   6 Damon Lindelof
   6 Anonymous
   5 Roxane Gay
   5 Rebecca Solnit
   5 Margaret Atwood
   5 Bryan Fuller
   4 Walter Benjamin
   4 Tatiana Maslany
   4 Steven Spielberg
   4 Melissa Rosenberg
   4 Martin Scorsese
   4 Joshua Oppenheimer

1:Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it's not a game. ~ Gary Gygax,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove

2:The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove

3:In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove

4:It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove

5:I've always wanted to explore characters of all races, all genders, all ages. It just seems to me to be a natural way to approach any kind of storytelling. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove

6:We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove

7:It is a curious thing that the more the world shrinks because of electronic communications, the more limitless becomes the province of the storytelling entertainer. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove

8:When you don't put your initials behind your name, and I've got tons of them, and when you talk about storytelling or love or gratitude, you're diminishing your legitimacy and importance in this world. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove

9:What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove

10:I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove

11:We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for. Malcolm Gladwell ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove

12:I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove

13:I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove

14:Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove

15:Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:History is Storytelling. ~ Yaa Gyasi,

2:ABS—Always Be Storytelling. ~ James Altucher,

3:Storytelling always changes time. ~ Stephen King,

4:We are the storytelling animal. ~ Salman Rushdie,

5:Storytelling is what lights my fire. ~ Hope Davis,

6:Storytelling has a narcotic power. ~ Robert Harris,

7:I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching ~ Frank McCourt,

8:I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching. ~ Frank McCourt,

9:I'm a fan of great storytelling. ~ Nikolaj Coster Waldau,

10:Storytelling is the important thing. ~ Vincent Kartheiser,

11:The best advocacy is always storytelling. ~ Willie Parker,

12:Storytelling is about listening in any media. ~ Chris Vance,

13:The storytelling ... is kind of amazing. ~ Lisa Schwarzbaum,

14:Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing. ~ Sanaa Lathan,

15:Quality storytelling inspires quality dialogue. ~ Robert McKee,

16:Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

17:I've set the bar quite high in terms of storytelling. ~ E L James,

18:Science is the storytelling of our time. ~ William Irwin Thompson,

19:The storytelling in 'Doctor Who' is quite universal. ~ Matt Smith,

20:foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate. ~ John Irving,

21:Storytelling is a gift, but writing is a learned art. ~ Beem Weeks,

22:It's a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling. ~ J J Abrams,

23:Storytelling can heal broken hearts and damaged minds. ~ Dean Koontz,

24:Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity. ~ Robert Redford,

25:Storytelling with music is a really powerful device. ~ Randy Harrison,

26:I am a big fan of music in terms of storytelling device. ~ John Musker,

27:Of course I believe in magic. I believe in storytelling. ~ Luke Taylor,

28:Storytelling is the oldest form of education. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,

29:The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell. ~ Julianna Baggott,

30:Gaming is going into storytelling. It was a new audience. ~ Kevin Spacey,

31:["John F. Kennedy" movie] was just really clever storytelling. ~ Rob Lowe,

32:Consistent contentment rarely makes for good storytelling. ~ Rebecca Serle,

33:Storytelling bridges the generational gaps in ideology. ~ Elise M Boulding,

34:I love all things Queen - their songs are epic storytelling. ~ Nina Arianda,

35:The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling. ~ Cecil B DeMille,

36:I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling. ~ Quentin Tarantino,

37:My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history. ~ Russell Banks,

38:I think in Russia, there's a lot of storytelling and anecdotes. ~ Eugene Mirman,

39:Storytelling is about two things; it's about character and plot. ~ George Lucas,

40:Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

41:I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making. ~ John le Carre,

42:Pixar has outdone itself in visual magic and vivid storytelling. ~ Peter Travers,

43:Storytelling is not something we do. Storytelling is who we are. ~ Carmine Gallo,

44:When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence. ~ Aristotle,

45:But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world. ~ Stephen King,

46:In Wales, singing and storytelling are party skills, not professions. ~ Rhys Ifans,

47:I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon,

48:Storytelling is my passion, and it rises from a love of reading. ~ Kelley Armstrong,

49:I've never been a fan of whimsical or confusing storytelling. ~ Paul Thomas Anderson,

50:The key elements of storytelling are love, mystery & conflict. ~ Mark Rubinstein,

51:There's not really genres as storytelling in Austria, unfortunately. ~ Susanne Wuest,

52:Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain. ~ Nicolas Cage,

53:Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening. ~ Catherynne M Valente,

54:Storytelling is power. A powerful book or movie can inform and inflame. ~ Jean Sasson,

55:I grew up on movie sets, getting to see storytelling happen up close. ~ Scott Eastwood,

56:The hardest part about storytelling is knowing what happens in the end. ~ Tye Sheridan,

57:We need storytelling. Otherwise life just goes on and on, like the number Pi. ~ Ang Lee,

58:Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~ Hannah Arendt,

59:I think the more honest you are with the storytelling, the better it works. ~ Fede Alvarez,

60:Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling. ~ Ted Lange,

61:I like the storytelling and reading the letters, the long-distance dedications. ~ Casey Kasem,

62:I think storytelling is storytelling. It doesn't matter what format it's shot on. ~ James Wan,

63:The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

64:Storytelling was the most honored of all talents, for it benefited everyone. ~ Stephenie Meyer,

65:As a kid, I loved storytelling, and I liked the way rappers would paint pictures. ~ Jensen Karp,

66:good storytelling is good because the characters — not the author — are in charge. ~ Sean Platt,

67:There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever. ~ Orson Scott Card,

68:Don’t try to be different or memorable with your storytelling voice—be authentic. ~ Steven James,

69:I still see storytelling for men by men that is always reinforcing the male gaze. ~ Jill Soloway,

70:Theater and film are essentially the same - just different kinds of storytelling. ~ Howard Shore,

71:Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else. ~ John Carpenter,

72:I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. ~ Bruce Springsteen,

73:I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life. ~ Armistead Maupin,

74:Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories. ~ Karen Armstrong,

75:Storytelling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups. ~ Marshall Ganz,

76:The way I look at it, movies are a different medium for storytelling than books. ~ Josh Hutcherson,

77:To me, the AMC brand is great storytelling - they call it slow-burn storytelling. ~ Billy Campbell,

78:Just as with storytelling, so with life: it's important how well it is done, not how long. ~ Seneca,

79:The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count. ~ Paul Auster,

80:I've always loved news. I've always loved storytelling and being where the scene is. ~ Abby Huntsman,

81:Television can take anything. It can take the most exaggerated of storytelling forms. ~ Ian Mckellen,

82:We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer,

83:I think color, for a costume designer, is one of your biggest storytelling devices. ~ Alexandra Byrne,

84:Maia Sharp is one of America's great singer-songwriters. Her storytelling runs profound and ~ Don Was,

85:Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it's not a game. ~ Gary Gygax,

86:I'm interested in storytelling. I love being an artist now and connecting through art. ~ Nicole Kidman,

87:Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it's not a game. ~ Gary Gygax,

88:The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling. ~ Lee Child,

89:Every big company and brand that you can think of has indulged in imaginative storytelling. ~ Anonymous,

90:Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling. ~ Bryan Fuller,

91:Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others. ~ David Mamet,

92:We are the storytelling chimpanzee, and we appreciate the meta-pattern involved in that. ~ Terry Pratchett,

93:I achieved perfection, my type of perfection - visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style. ~ Jack Kirby,

94:Keeping your characters consistent and believable is a very important part of good storytelling ~ Anonymous,

95:I love storytelling. I love stories, and I love the way in which we connect through stories. ~ Nicole Kidman,

96:I make no distinction between writing and storytelling; I've always wanted to tell stories. ~ Damon Lindelof,

97:What’s really important is storytelling. None of it matters if it doesn’t support the story. ~ Wally Pfister,

98:Beneath its broad surface, storytelling should always work hard to say more than it seems to. ~ Frank Delaney,

99:Seeing a fancy TV up close made her recognize how much she loved to witness good storytelling ~ Rakesh Satyal,

100:In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. ~ Walt Disney,

101:It has been said that next to hunger and thirst, our most basic human need is for storytelling. ~ Khalil Gibran,

102:Part of George R.R. Martins brilliant storytelling is taking the carpet out from under your feet. ~ Harry Lloyd,

103:Storytelling is a great gift because humanity is a great gift, something God himself delights in. ~ Mike Cosper,

104:Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. ~ Karen Thompson Walker,

105:The powerful alchemy of his storytelling transforms the atthanni—the half a rupee coin—into a rupaiya. ~ Gulzar,

106:The power of storytelling is exactly this: to bridge the gaps where everything else has crumbled. ~ Paulo Coelho,

107:Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling. ~ Neil Jordan,

108:If you’re too rigid in your thinking you may miss some wonderful opportunities for storytelling. ~ Vince Gilligan,

109:Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder. ~ Aaron Sorkin,

110:storytelling is not just a way to remember what happened; it’s a way to understand what happened. ~ Eric Greitens,

111:They are the four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence. ~ Emily Esfahani Smith,

112:For what is storytelling if not ideas brought full and whole to the inner eyes of those who listen? ~ Sue Harrison,

113:I fell in love with commerce and the opportunities that come with compelling visual storytelling. ~ Ruzwana Bashir,

114:We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls. ~ William Landay,

115:A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work. ~ Diane Setterfield,

116:I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world. ~ Kay Kenyon,

117:Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. ~ Stephen King,

118:The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. ~ Walter Benjamin,

119:... the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty. ~ Miriam Toews,

120:We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives ~ Stephen Jay Gould,

121:You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it. ~ Margaret Atwood,

122:The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling. ~ Zainab Salbi,

123:Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls. ~ Frank Darabont,

124:We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,

125:I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture. ~ Sherman Alexie,

126:I learned the power of storytelling and the responsibility that people with influence have to speak out ~ Demi Lovato,

127:My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling. ~ Jonathan Hickman,

128:No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time. ~ Joyce Carol Oates,

129:An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart. ~ Uri Shulevitz,

130:Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. ~ Plato,

131:I like storytelling, and I feel more confident as the years have gone on about my ability to do that. ~ Walton Goggins,

132:Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood. ~ Salman Rushdie,

133:[on scene execution] Interesting isn't the point...storytelling momentum and relevance is. ~ Larry Brooks,

134:An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care. ~ Steven Moffat,

135:Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both. ~ Alethea Kontis,

136:I do think you learn things about genre storytelling, but you also have to be careful not to learn too much. ~ David Eick,

137:[M]an is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a storytelling animal. ~ Alasdair Macintyre,

138:Most actors are drawn towards historical tellings because it's one of the most simple forms of storytelling. ~ Ben Barnes,

139:This book shows how to apply the power of storytelling to strategic messaging in the age of social media. ~ David A Aaker,

140:A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling. ~ Margaret Wise Brown,

141:All great literary works influence us as writers, not their stories as much as their storytelling ability. ~ Michael Scott,

142:I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot. ~ Steven Spielberg,

143:Storytelling has worked for 5000 years. It’s not going to stop now just because we have blogs and tweets. ~ James Altucher,

144:What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly. ~ Terry Brooks,

145:I believe the adventure game genre will never die any more than any type of storytelling would ever die. ~ Roberta Williams,

146:People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals. ~ Michael Shermer,

147:Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. ~ Margaret Atwood,

148:Creating skillful native content has little to do with selling and a lot to do with skillful storytelling. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

149:For me, the best journalism is usually the best storytelling, and the best stories are those of real people. ~ Jason Rezaian,

150:Like a human rights lawyer who uses the law to rectify wrongs, I use filmic storytelling for the same effect. ~ Pamela Yates,

151:The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie. ~ Simon Kinberg,

152:As long as we are engaged in storytelling that moves the culture forward, it doesn't matter what format it is. ~ LeVar Burton,

153:Infinite possibilities exist within the art of storytelling. To me, it is nothing less than the magic of creation. ~ Rai Aren,

154:I think that my sensibilities are becoming slightly less delicate and I'm venturing out in a storytelling world. ~ Will Smith,

155:The album ['A Seat at the Table'] really feels like storytelling for us all and our family and our lineage. ~ Solange Knowles,

156:I guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can. ~ Karla Souza,

157:No great television show has ever rested on just one person. They're all about great ensembles and storytelling. ~ Justin Kirk,

158:Stories are attempts to share our values and beliefs. Storytelling is worthwhile when it tells what we stand for. ~ Simon Sinek,

159:There's no harmony in most people in a way, and I'm attracted to it, and I think it makes for good storytelling. ~ Greg Kinnear,

160:What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect. ~ Aleksandar Hemon,

161:Tribeca has always celebrated the most exciting new forms of storytelling, from video games to virtual reality. ~ Jane Rosenthal,

162:We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us. ~ Jerome Bruner,

163:Storytelling is at the heart of life. As a child, I was never bored because I could always get on with my story. ~ Marion Woodman,

164:Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and its a brand new audience for me. ~ Kevin Spacey,

165:I think video games are going to completely take over storytelling in our society. Video games are not a fad. ~ Guillermo del Toro,

166:Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm. ~ Ashwin Sanghi,

167:Stayed is a woman’s story of discovery and acceptance, redefined by Tanya Anne Crosby’s dramatic storytelling, ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

168:Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing. ~ Lauren Groff,

169:I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist. ~ Morgan Spurlock,

170:It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling. ~ Osamu Dazai,

171:While I think storytelling is a meaningful way to spend your life... it does feel a little bit secondary or off-point. ~ David Simon,

172:Every good story deserves a happy ending – it’s a basic rule of storytelling. The boy next door certainly shouldn’t die. ~ Cat Clarke,

173:History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. ~ Jill Lepore,

174:I'm really trying to focus on the storytelling, more so than ever before I think, partly because it makes for easier pages. ~ Jim Lee,

175:Good storytelling is harder than it sounds, but the easy part is that everyone has the ability to do it. ...Tap into it. ~ Peter Guber,

176:I don't know when I made that active decision to be a writer or to try to write, but I know I always liked storytelling. ~ John Ridley,

177:I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film. ~ Guillermo del Toro,

178:I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. ~ E L Doctorow,

179:Elvis Costello's song writing is so peerless and individualistic. It's storytelling and it's deeply intelligent and clever. ~ Chip Esten,

180:I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process. ~ Charlie Kaufman,

181:In storytelling, the audience actually wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that they're doing it. ~ Andrew Stanton,

182:Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling. ~ Jeremy Northam,

183:I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at. ~ Mary Mattingly,

184:My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone. ~ James Patterson,

185:Theirs was the Norway of witchcraft, storytelling, and incest, not minimalist furniture and the Nobel Peace Prize. Rural ~ Blair Braverman,

186:Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time. ~ Ashwin Sanghi,

187:There is an extraordinary power in storytelling that stirs the imagination and makes an indelible impression on the mind. ~ Brennan Manning,

188:I'm kind of a pop balladeer because I love the art of storytelling. I call myself 'HBO for the ears'; I sing little movies. ~ Amanda McBroom,

189:Storytelling is the greatest activity of any culture. Storytelling is how you build a family, how you pass along identity. ~ Randall Wallace,

190:Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing. Look here, ~ Lauren Groff,

191:The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself. ~ Mike Figgis,

192:My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation. ~ Geoffrey S Fletcher,

193:Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you're saying, 'Once upon a time.' That's what writing is all about. ~ Mary Higgins Clark,

194:'Nashville' songs and country music have always been about storytelling and about the heart and confessionals. They're monologues. ~ Chip Esten,

195:Storytelling is an escape from the jail of the self, leading to the ultimate adventure--seeing life through the eyes of another. ~ Tobias Wolff,

196:Human beings are storytelling animals. That's what separates us from other creatures, not just having thumbs or using tools. ~ Marion Dane Bauer,

197:If someone likes my fiction more for the quality of my prose rather than the quality of my storytelling, I'm doing something wrong. ~ Jamie Ford,

198:Storytelling wasn't about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told. ~ Jennifer McMahon,

199:Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction. ~ Roxane Gay,

200:I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds. ~ Alex Gibney,

201:I think storytelling is all about children. We human beings love to hear stories being told - and it first happens when you're a kid. ~ David Chase,

202:I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture. ~ Andy Serkis,

203:When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling. ~ Ray LaMontagne,

204:It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life ~ Joe Hill,

205:The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant. ~ Peter Hessler,

206:Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with Titanic. ~ Carlton Cuse,

207:I don't think there's a subject matter that can't absorb 3-D; that can't tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique. ~ Martin Scorsese,

208:People are instinctive storytellers. Our ancestors, according to evolutionary psychologists, preferred descriptive storytelling over facts. ~ Amy Webb,

209:What I like is not a particular genre, it's storytelling. There's a lot of great storytelling in jazz, and in folk and in country music. ~ Lizz Wright,

210:I hope that as my career continues I get to create and work on more LGBT projects and bring LGBT storytelling into more mainstream media! ~ Hannah Hart,

211:A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon,

212:Every bit as visceral and hypnotic as its award-winning predecessor, On the Ropes is a tour-de-force of fluid, yet detailed storytelling. ~ Dave Gibbons,

213:For me, the drive is storytelling. To be a part of an art that tells a story and to be a catalyst, a color in that, is very exciting. ~ Alden Ehrenreich,

214:Nothing unleashes curiosity in an audience like good storytelling. Nothing inspires storytelling, in turn, like the results of curiosity. ~ Brian Grazer,

215:People seem generally happy to see their favorite world come to life, even if it it slightly changed to fit storytelling for television. ~ Jade Hassoune,

216:I just adore being on set. I adore storytelling. I can be on a set 70 hours a week and on those weekends, I'll still want to watch movies. ~ Jay Baruchel,

217:...love of art—be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music—enables people to transcend any barriers man has yet devised. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer,

218:Theatre is filled w/ passion, risk and drama (as much behind-the-curtain as on stage), perfect ingredients for documentary storytelling. ~ Dori Berinstein,

219:Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we'd naturally do. ~ Dan Harmon,

220:The thing I love about this story [The Killing] and this type of storytelling is that I don't have to know the end before I know the beginning. ~ Veena Sud,

221:I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times. ~ Philip Pullman,

222:We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form. ~ Edwidge Danticat,

223:For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn't mean the people have to be mean. I've never liked mean-spirited comedy. ~ Michael Schur,

224:Historical romance characters often benefit from the possible, which gives much more scope for storytelling than the likely or the everyday. ~ Theresa Romain,

225:When people sat in caves, they told stories. It was for sharing, learning, entertaining. Storytelling is as old as we are. It will never die. ~ Mark Rubinstein,

226:Maybe I'm a little biased, but shows like 'Dexter' and 'Southland,' I'm just enthralled by that sort of storytelling, kind of clever and patient. ~ Shawn Hatosy,

227:You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there. ~ Michael Koryta,

228:You've got to trust your instincts, your judgment and trust the storytelling that came before and the quality of the acting with the emotion. ~ Jean Marc Vallee,

229:I am a storyteller, and I grew up with a father who told big-fish stories, so storytelling is very much a part of me. It was a part of my family. ~ Susan Stroman,

230:If your stories are all about your products and services, that's not storytelling. It's a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger. ~ Jay Baer,

231:I love to do fashion. I always put fashion in all of my storytelling because that's what I am, but I'm not selling clothes, I'm telling a story. ~ Patricia Field,

232:In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods. ~ Roger Ebert,

233:Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process. ~ Bradley Cooper,

234:The quality of a brand’s storytelling is directly proportional to the quality of its content. If it’s not good, no one will pay attention. What ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

235:While I don't like violent programs per se, I do like good storytelling, which made me a fan of shows like Breaking Bad and American Horror Story. ~ Hank Stuever,

236:In one of the paradoxes of storytelling, readers want to predict how the story will end (or how it will get to the end), but they want to be wrong. ~ Steven James,

237:She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one. ~ Marie Rutkoski,

238:Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not. ~ Michael Shermer,

239:My work is basically images set to my particular voice. It's the way the images rhyme and the rhythm. It's a way of economical storytelling for me. ~ Frances Stark,

240:Music's always been a big part of my life, but it kind of all happened in one big ball of storytelling rather than splitting acting and singing apart. ~ Clare Bowen,

241:There is a big difference between storytelling and being alive. Those are the two things that I prefer in life - telling stories and being alive. ~ Jaco Van Dormael,

242:With any sci-fi fantasy storytelling, you must have rules be very clear, otherwise you lose people, like 'OK, they can fly; now they can't fly.' ~ Melissa Rosenberg,

243:I think my love is storytelling. No matter what it is, it's storytelling. And so whatever the medium is, what's right for the story, I enjoy doing it. ~ Neil Strauss,

244:Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game. ~ Peter Guber,

245:Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses. ~ Margaret Atwood,

246:Chord progression is progression of emotions; storytelling - taking one person from one mood to the next. We are doing the same thing within a DJ set. ~ Richie Hawtin,

247:My life is making movies. I like storytelling, and I've got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up. ~ George Lucas,

248:For all their reputation for chattiness and storytelling, the Irish I knew were so skillful with words there was sometimes no need for them at all. ~ Camille DeAngelis,

249:For me and my storytelling and the way that I embrace stories in the way that I embrace characters, I desperately needed to know that everything was okay. ~ Will Smith,

250:If you're doing a big spectacle film, you've got to be mindful of large masses. Even then, you've got to be responsible only to your storytelling. ~ Guillermo del Toro,

251:Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive. ~ Dexter Palmer,

252:The bedrock thing of country music is, it's about storytelling. I feel like I was able to find a niche because I connected to that in some way. ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter,

253:I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film. ~ Michael Giacchino,

254:I've always wanted to explore characters of all races, all genders, all ages. It just seems to me to be a natural way to approach any kind of storytelling. ~ Alan Moore,

255:I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them. ~ Lawrence Wright,

256:Actors, we like stories, we like storytelling, we love being a part of the story, and if you give us a story that's interesting then we'll want to do it. ~ Aaron Stanford,

257:I like storytelling movies and more than that I like historical movies; and I think someday I'll definitely make a movie about the past 50 years history. ~ Asghar Farhadi,

258:in a story there is always a reader, and this reader is a fundamental ingredient not only of the process of storytelling but also of the tale itself. Today, ~ Umberto Eco,

259:In movies, storytelling and every single art form, we're creating wonder. You're starting with a blank page and creating something that doesn't exist. ~ David Copperfield,

260:The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound? ~ Martin Scorsese,

261:We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

262:We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

263:A short film is just another storytelling medium like TV, Features, and Webisodes. I am just thrilled that Silent Cargo is getting out there for people to see. ~ Ellen Wong,

264:First of all, there is absolutely an order that we have put together to create the maximum number of surprises, but that's just part of our storytelling. ~ Mitchell Hurwitz,

265:[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . . ~ Doris Lessing,

266:Expedition EVEREST adds a new dimension to our storytelling in Disney's Animal Kingdom. It's a thrilling adventure themed to the folklore of the mysterious yeti. ~ Joe Rohde,

267:Gareth [Edwards] was very open to just shaping the performances and the scenes to fit what was happening with the actors and the storytelling that was emerging. ~ Alan Tudyk,

268:My story - my own personal story - ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished. ~ Diane Setterfield,

269:There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do. ~ Aaron Sorkin,

270:I love comedy. I love to make people laugh. (But) anything that's telling a good story makes me happy. So, I just like to be part of the storytelling process. ~ Teryl Rothery,

271:Too many brands treat social media as a one way, broadcast channel, rather than a two-way dialogue through which emotional storytelling can be transferred. ~ Simon Mainwaring,

272:Woodrell's storytelling is as melodic, jangly and energetic as a good banjo riff.... Sammy Barlach's story is a tragedy, but the telling of it is a pleasure. ~ Valerie Sayers,

273:It is a great vehicle for storytelling, especially for a certain kind of exhaustively reported, painstakingly fact-checked, and beautifully produced narrative. ~ Clara Jeffery,

274:People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. ~ Jeanette Winterson,

275:Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. ~ Doris Lessing,

276:The Internet is allowing us to get back to what's really more natural, which is that storytelling is a shared thing. It's our natural way to be communal. ~ Joseph Gordon Levitt,

277:If I really knew how to do good storytelling, I would be a writer. Mystery is not a huge part of it. ... It's tension, it's relationships. I think it's a struggle. ~ Scott Cohen,

278:For a truly effective social campaign, a brand needs to embrace the first principles of marketing, which involves brand definition and consistent storytelling. ~ Simon Mainwaring,

279:I like storytelling, and for storytelling you need a drama. And for there to be drama, you need twists, and by twists I mean the ability to constantly change the ~ Asghar Farhadi,

280:I really admire visual storytelling that shows you what's happening, instead of tells you what's happening. I think it really forces the filmmaking to be very clear. ~ John Kahrs,

281:It is a curious thing that the more the world shrinks because of electronic communications, the more limitless becomes the province of the storytelling entertainer. ~ Walt Disney,

282:We learn about ourselves when we learn about others,” Jade said. “We respect different ways of life as food, traditions, and storytelling are shared across borders. ~ Julie C Dao,

283:I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern. ~ David Fincher,

284:I just loved storytelling. That's what I thought I would end up doing. I thought I would probably go to school and end up writing for a magazine or something. ~ Michelle Rodriguez,

285:I always say that, if you have great actors and great storytelling and great monsters, and you mix them together, nine times out of 10, it explodes in your face. ~ Gregory Nicotero,

286:I enjoy storytelling. I like to write it, I like to direct it, I like to act in it, I like to produce it. I like to be around storytellers. That's what excites me. ~ Bryan Cranston,

287:It's populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling. ~ Aaron Sorkin,

288:The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today’s life. ~ Matthew Weiner,

289:I've always loved writing, and the impulse for me is storytelling. I don't sit down and think: 'What political message can I sell?' I love the creativity of it. ~ Randa Abdel Fattah,

290:I love graphic design. I love working with design, and I love storytelling, so I've been working on a children's book for a while, and I'd like to see that through. ~ Colleen Haskell,

291:Storytelling, a primitive art, is as old as the beginning of mankind. People want to receive what's out there in the form of stories, not just facts, opinion, analysis. ~ Lee Gutkind,

292:The key is to work with people who are passionate about storytelling and who have a similar sensibility of the type and nature of the stories that you want to tell. ~ Patrick Lussier,

293:I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion. ~ Alan Ball,

294:I think my mother's and Granny's storytelling had had the same effect upon me when a child, as the reading of books: my mind was stimulated, my creativity encouraged. ~ Mark Mathabane,

295:People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel ~ Studs Terkel,

296:To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood. ~ Ben Marcus,

297:We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts. ~ Michael Lewis,

298:I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any. ~ Salman Rushdie,

299:I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write. ~ Khaled Hosseini,

300:With movies and TV, storytelling, it's a different medium. I really love it, but I'm one part of many, many pieces of that puzzle and a lot of it is out of my control. ~ Juliette Lewis,

301:At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them. ~ Kevin Spacey,

302:Horror is great storytelling with scary elements on top of it, but if you don't have great storytelling, you can have all the scares in the world, but the movie won't work. ~ Jason Blum,

303:Since 1977, there have been many science fiction movies, but none has managed to equal [A New Hope's] blend of adventure, likable characters, and epic storytelling. ~ James Berardinelli,

304:The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial. ~ Aleksandar Hemon,

305:Storytelling sticks in the mind because it attaches emotions to events, and that's the way we remember things. If you don't tell stories, no one will remember what you say. ~ Nick Morgan,

306:Everything has its cycle. I think it's appropriate for us to be ending now. But the beauty of storytelling, and the beauty of film and television is that it continues on. ~ Jennifer Beals,

307:He was charmed out of all reason as he watched her, this sandy, disheveled, storytelling mermaid, who seemed already to belong to him and yet wanted nothing to do with him. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

308:When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness. ~ Vincent Starrett, Attributed to Starrett in Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (2012), page 112.,

309:Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it! ~ Ben Mikaelsen,

310:Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story. ~ Erskine Caldwell,

311:So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview) ~ Nalo Hopkinson,

312:So that’s why I’m such a big fan of storytelling. I think the most important thing is empathy. And it’s less about ‘those people’. Because I think we’re all ‘those people’. ~ Jeannette Walls,

313:Star Wars is mythology. Its like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. Its the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless. ~ Michael Franti,

314:Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too. ~ Howard Gardner,

315:I think television is a unique form, in terms of storytelling. Having source material for these really dense, complicated, serialized dramas is a great way of world-building. ~ Chris Albrecht,

316:It's become almost a cliche at this point that movies in the general sense are the place you go for superheroes and explosions and TV is where you go for actual storytelling. ~ Alan Sepinwall,

317:Poetry’s got a really particular kind of magic. It brings together storytelling, music,lyric,really deep intense feeling, it just seems like a really irresistible concoction to me. ~ Liz Berry,

318:I can do my part of the storytelling. I can carry it. I can paint it. I can maneuver it. I can massage it. But if I don't have anything to work with, then there's nothing. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn,

319:I think there is much more storytelling in stand-up now. Less emphasis on the joke. Jokes are still important, but it feels like a more intimate and personal experience these days. ~ Doug Benson,

320:The L Word reaffirmed that good storytelling has a way of creating community. Fans everywhere have been connecting with each other online, in public and at home-viewing parties. ~ Jennifer Beals,

321:The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

322:Everyone will say I'm insane, but I don't care, Rose. Is it insane to marry the girl I love? A girl with golden brown hair, with gifts of beauty and goodness and storytelling? ~ Melanie Dickerson,

323:My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon,

324:Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment. ~ Maria Tatar,

325:I make a living from storytelling - if you're a public person and you sing songs about getting married to get a visa, and you are actually doing that, you're gonna end up in trouble. ~ Jens Lekman,

326:I think good storytelling continues to teach you how it unfolds. And so I don't think that film and stage are mutually exclusive at all. It's just that you're always in a wide shot. ~ Terry Kinney,

327:I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of. ~ Josh Hutcherson,

328:I think it's very important for any actor to eventually produce, and create the projects they want to create. I believe it's all a part of the same art form, which is storytelling. ~ Michael Eklund,

329:Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

330:My background was producing and writing and performing in television when I started out, and I really missed that, that whole creative process that comes from sort of 'me' storytelling. ~ Eric Bana,

331:Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post. ~ Kurt Sutter,

332:His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere -- or for stories that made no sense. ~ John Irving,

333:Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them. ~ Serge Schmemann,

334:Social media companies must combine their mastery of the latest in real-time, location based or augmented reality technologies in the service of clear and consistent storytelling. ~ Simon Mainwaring,

335:The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling. We're all part of the story; we can all contribute and participate. ~ Adrian Grenier,

336:Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did. ~ Sarah Kay,

337:The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what? ~ Bruno Heller,

338:I used to do a lot of story writing and storytelling coming up through grade school. By the time I got to college, I decided that I wanted to perform as well, and that's where I started. ~ Rhea Seehorn,

339:Studios and networks who ignore either shift - whether the increasing sophistication of storytelling, or the constantly shifting sands of technological advancement - will be left behind. ~ Kevin Spacey,

340:We actually try our best to be non-biased, but for me, that was the best movie ["Sicario"], filmmaking-wise and storytelling-wise, and connected to me the most. I thought it was great. ~ John Krasinski,

341:That's the crux of my prayer for you as you walk through difficult relationship -- that you would begin to see God's storytelling in your life even in the midst of pain and bewilderment. ~ Mary E DeMuth,

342:But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling. ~ Guillermo del Toro,

343:I'm too much left brain. I very much have an emotional response to things; I love literature and films and storytelling. I need to nourish my right side, it doesn't get a lot of exercise. ~ Felicity Jones,

344:Old wives' tales — that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it. ~ Angela Carter,

345:Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for. ~ Russell Banks,

346:Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do. It's why Nike is Nike, it's why Apple is Apple, it's why Walt Disney built Disney World and it's why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

347:To me good storytelling is about journeys. It's about people's journeys, people's discoveries and how they deal with those discoveries; circumstances that put people in different situations. ~ Scott Cohen,

348:...we are a narrative, storytelling species. Revealing our own histories, and understanding those of others can really help us appreciate the humanity in all of our fellow individuals. ~ Stephen P Hinshaw,

349:I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two. ~ David Duchovny,

350:Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away. ~ Salman Rushdie,

351:Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy. ~ James Carroll,

352:At breakfast, Babette read all our horoscopes aloud, using her storytelling voice. I tried not to listen when she got to mine, although I think I wanted to listen, I think I sought some clues. ~ Don DeLillo,

353:I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art-be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music-enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer,

354:I love being a part of storytelling, so whether I'm getting to do that on Survivor, or do it through kids' adventure books, or directing a movie, it's all sort of the same: Once Upon a Time... ~ Jeff Probst,

355:Even if I made pornography, the trauma would show, though. It will always be there because it's my verité. It's my kind of narrative, it's my kind of storytelling. It's not style; it's just there. ~ Lav Diaz,

356:I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order. ~ Sarah Kay,

357:I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling. ~ Hayley Atwell,

358:Literature is nothing more than the expansion of storytelling. Storytelling is obviously the impulse to chronicle something you’ve been through in order to give it its due, to have a catharsis. ~ Ron Perlman,

359:The technology can change, but storytelling remains the same. It's just a digital world now instead of an analog world, but now the storytelling's the same. You got different tools. That's all. ~ David Lynch,

360:My brand is good storytelling. I really want [my company] Hillman Grad Productions to be associated with great stories, interesting characters; things that are three-dimensional and feel honest. ~ Lena Waithe,

361:Part of what makes me love acting so much is, I love the mystery of the universe and the human experience, and storytelling is a great way to perform that, and that is always inspiring to me. ~ Mariana Klaveno,

362:I just feel that God gave me a certain gift, and that was to go out, do storytelling and be an actor. And my responsibility with that gift is to do the best job possible and to re-create real life. ~ Eric Close,

363:I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now. ~ Richard Condon,

364:Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness. ~ Noam Shpancer,

365:The kind of people that love 'The Rocketeer' are the kind of people that love good storytelling and innocence and a better world, so to speak, so they're almost always nice people to bump into. ~ Billy Campbell,

366:"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. ~ Roger Ebert,

367:I do think there are always ways to create what seem like insurmountable powers, but then suddenly you find their limitations and that's the nature of comic book storytelling - always has been. ~ Scott Derrickson,

368:I grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, and I just loved film. My folks would take us to the drive-in on summer nights, and we'd sit on the hood of the car. I just had this profound love for storytelling. ~ Brad Pitt,

369:Im not really devoted or specified towards any specific genre at all. I really like it all. Theres good storytelling in all the genres, you know. I just want to tell good stories and do good work. ~ Angela Bettis,

370:Anaphora is a storytelling device where a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses and sentences. In politics Democratic and Republican leaders share one big love—anaphora. ~ Carmine Gallo,

371:European films were what it was about for me - the sensations I needed, the depth, the storytelling, the characters, the directors, and the freedom that you can't really find in American films ~ Charlotte Rampling,

372:A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living. ~ Christopher Buehlman,

373:Electronic music lends itself to an abstract way of storytelling, so it keeps evolving. Theres a whole movement truly driving music further and there is no other music innovating as much as film music ~ Hans Zimmer,

374:I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making. ~ Yann Martel,

375:It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me. ~ Jose Padilha,

376:I love the supernatural in storytelling. The Twilight Zone was a huge influence on me, in terms of writing and storytelling, where you're not restricted to the parameters of reality to tell your tale. ~ Bryan Fuller,

377:In documentary films, being able to be a storytelling and embrace film as an art form - while being very clearly connected in trying to help make the world a better place - is really important to me. ~ James Redford,

378:When you don't put your initials behind your name, and I've got tons of them, and when you talk about storytelling or love or gratitude, you're diminishing your legitimacy and importance in this world. ~ Brene Brown,

379:I feel that the power that storytelling has to change people, to bring them together, to have that cathartic sort of experience, is something that definitely has helped my life be worthwhile and better. ~ Karla Souza,

380:My life has been the antithesis of that book 'The Secret'. I've always been interested in doing what I do. I love storytelling and I really enjoyed acting, but it never seemed like a realistic thing. ~ Aaron Stanford,

381:We need time to relax and enjoy ourselves too, no matter how dark the story. The occasional humorous moment helps with that. That's one of the things that Joss Whedon excels at in his storytelling. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,

382:To aspiring writers, I say : Don't give up. Storytelling has been an integral part of the human condition since the beginning of time. Don't let anyone tell you your dreams don't have value. They do. ~ Beverly Jenkins,

383:Fiction is very, very important," he said, his voice is rising. "Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction. ~ Kristine Grayson,

384:Losing all the preconceptions that I had about storytelling, about the world, you know, and learning to see the world from a different perspective. It sounds romantic, but it's not an easy process at all. ~ Ciro Guerra,

385:'St. Elmo's Fire' is one of my favorite films. I like the storytelling of those teenage American films. You don't get that now. Teenage American movies are all about sick jokes, puking a lot, arse jokes. ~ James McAvoy,

386:There’s a saying in the oral tradition of storytelling that when you tell a story, when you give out a story, it is no longer yours; it belongs to everyone who encounters it and everyone who takes it in. ~ Ishmael Beah,

387:The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers. ~ Charles Kuralt,

388:I was always storytelling, since I was a child. I remember myself at 10 years old telling stories to my sisters and brother. This is something I did through my adolescence and even through my twenties. ~ Pedro Almodovar,

389:When necessity demands it, I'm an excellent liar. Not the noblest of skills, but useful. It ties closely to acting and storytelling, and I learned all three from my father, who was a master craftsman. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,

390:I really enjoy the pastiche storytelling of watching separate stories slowly collide with one another. The audience gets to participate in trying to guess and decipher how one story will connect with another. ~ Tim Kring,

391:I've been very passionate about storytelling ever since I was a kid. I really don't remember a time when I didn't want to be an actor, and ever since I could remember, I had a really extravagant imagination. ~ Inbar Lavi,

392:Someday, I'd like to sit down with a small group of people, in a relaxed environment, and make a film that feels more independent. That way we can be a little more free in terms of storytelling and subject. ~ Chris Wedge,

393:It’s easy to find that five or six hours have sped by without my noticing. I am having fun. This is not my world, these are not my fears. Supernatural is great storytelling, and it is not my story. ~ Abigail Thomas,

394:What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

395:For me, a story's a story if people want to hear it; it's very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I'm speaking it out loud. ~ Sandra Cisneros,

396:Me and Biggie share a storytelling ability--he was an actor on wax, too. His stories were so vivid and torrid, he made you feel them. And we both have the hardness. When I come out on the mic, you know it's me. ~ Black Rob,

397:For me, I think there's a lot more room in cable television to tell broader stories. NBC and the networks, they're all very mainstream, and they're a little more conservative in how they approach storytelling. ~ Gabriel Macht,

398:I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired. ~ Melissa Rosenberg,

399:Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity. ~ Nicholson Baker,

400:From the beginning of time, we've told stories, Shamans and Medicine People, and not to be pompous about it, but I feel like that is the lineage I take down and where I come from. There is magic to storytelling. ~ Lynn Collins,

401:I believe that Jesus was both priest and poet. Imagine those powerful parables! My experience as a priest tells me it's not possible to reach the hearts of the congregants without a bit of poetry and storytelling. ~ Uwem Akpan,

402:You may have observed in your own lives that there is a great power in storytelling. A well-spun tale can transport listeners away from their humdrum lives and return them with an enlarged sense of the world. ~ Jonathan Auxier,

403:I'm a visual filmmaker so the camera is a big part of my storytelling tool and it's something that I really rely on to tell a scene or create the suspense that I need and create the emotion of a scene or a sequence. ~ James Wan,

404:I'm not a big gamer myself. I've (become) increasingly interested in games. And I certainly am passionate about, about storytelling in gaming. And, and the marriage of, you know, immersive characters, with gaming. ~ Andy Serkis,

405:That film, I mean "The shining" got me thinking about the way of telling stories and how effective it can be and how it can really shape people and move people to such a degree. It got me questioning storytelling. ~ Freya Mavor,

406:In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here. ~ Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy,

407:I remember that - you know, I didnt receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling. ~ Eduardo Galeano,

408:Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

409:Country is bringing in a little rock element... a little '80s element. Melody is king now. But its just in the music, its not so much in the songwriting, which is still very basic to the storytelling aspect of it. ~ Lionel Richie,

410:I am and will always be a HUGE Star Wars Geek and wanted to study film making. I really am not a fan of writing- I prefer storytelling and rather jump to storyboards to relay my vision then a lot of wordy words. ~ Holly Golightly,

411:I like directing much better. It's more fun, that's all there is to it. It's essentially the same job, which is storytelling, but you have more control over the way you want to tell the story. It's a high. I love it. ~ Mel Gibson,

412:Storytelling requires two minds. The writer draws the basic outlines and adds some detail. It’s never complete, however, until the reader fills in that outline with the colors and experiences of his or her own life. ~ Rysa Walker,

413:There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters. ~ Sean Bean,

414:I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting. ~ Karla Souza,

415:Storytelling wise, you've gotta take it as far as you can possibly take it with each individual movie. If you're holding out something for a sequel or some cliff-hanger, that's not how I think of a satisfying story. ~ Rian Johnson,

416:Back in the day, you'd walk down to a street corner and see some people making a story with a hat in front of them. It's ancient entertainment, ancient storytelling and oral history - now we're doing it on YouTube. ~ Rosario Dawson,

417:Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like. ~ Aaron Sorkin,

418:If I weren't a theatre designer, I wouldn't be any other kind of designer. Design is interesting to me as it relates to narrative: the design has to support the narrative. Storytelling is the most important thing. ~ Christine Jones,

419:I was a Spidey fan as a kid. I always liked the complexity and the teenaged angst that Spider-Man, Peter Parker, always had to deal with. It was kind of a deeper, darker storytelling that just good-guy-beats-bad-guy. ~ Jack Coleman,

420:Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it’s nice to go, Well, I’m gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling. You don’t get to do that on television. ~ Sarah Paulson,

421:The western will always be here. And it just depends on how good you make one. And one movie doesn't kill it. And one movie doesn't preserve it. It's storytelling. It's a very American thing. I'll continue to do it. ~ Kevin Costner,

422:I'd love to take a stab at writing videogames. There are a lot of storytelling opportunities that really aren't being taken advantage of in that field. I'd like to experiment with telling a truly non-linear story. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,

423:Storytelling is about exploring the nuances of life, the anguish within beauty and the wisdom within pain. When we hold our stories inside, they weigh us down. When we release them, we find not only voice but perspective. ~ Jen Knox,

424:Am I boring you? I don't really care, I suppose, but I'll be more comfortable if I knew all this interested you. No doubt when I get the hang of storytelling, after a chapter or two, I'll go faster and digress less often. ~ John Barth,

425:When it comes to storytelling, not taking risks is riskier than swinging for the fences. I have very simple ambitions when it comes to taking risks in storytelling and programming. I try very hard to avoid the expected. ~ David Nevins,

426:Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction. ~ David Brin,

427:For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling. ~ Matt Haig,

428:Lots of TV is kind of becoming almost the new form for adult storytelling and cinema, but still with some independent films you still have those kind of jewels that people are able to make and it takes a lot of effort. ~ Alicia Vikander,

429:Truman Capote said that he learned how to write a story not from reading but from sitting on his aunts' front porch in Alabama and listening to them tell stories. This was my earliest education in the art of storytelling too. ~ Ann Hood,

430:I have always enjoyed storytelling, especially narratives told through the voices of the African diaspora. Their influences are so diverse, so vast. I love incorporating elements of fiction and fantasy into their realities. ~ C P Patrick,

431:What a director does... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools. ~ John Carpenter,

432:Where we stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves. ~ Gabrielle Roth,

433:I do like 'Munich'.It's a really wonderful film. I mean, there's 'Schindler's List', there's 'Saving Private Ryan'. But 'Munich' - of all the other films, Munich would be the one that's really, really amazing storytelling. ~ Janusz Kaminski,

434:I liked Truffaut a lot, I've felt a lot of admiration for his way to address the audience, and his storytelling.... La nuit américaine is adorable, and another film I like to see is L'enfant sauvage, with its fine humanism. ~ Ingmar Bergman,

435:I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that's what really got me hooked. You could say that's where it all began. ~ Kurt Sutter,

436:I think I can work with different crews; I've worked with Bulgarian, Norwegian, Japanese, and Chinese crews. For me, the most important thing is the storytelling, and I'm really comfortable working with all kinds of languages. ~ Isabel Coixet,

437:I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon,

438:Storytelling has driven faith and religious practice, keeping them alive for millennia. Just as every hymn, icon, and stained-glass window in a church links to a story, brands have the potential to build holistic identities. ~ Martin Lindstrom,

439:The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

440:The ultimate gift, in our digital age, is a CEO who has the storytelling talent to capture the imagination of the markets while surrounding themselves with people who can show incremental progress against that vision each day. ~ Scott Galloway,

441:It's my passion, that's what I wanna do, it's the end goal, that's what I crave every second of the day is to be working on a production but also to be the person leading the production and guiding the pacing of the storytelling. ~ Logan Lerman,

442:Strangely, Indians travelling outside the subcontinent do not seem to have left itineraries of where they went or descriptions of what they saw. Distant places enter the narratives of storytelling only very occasionally. Notions ~ Romila Thapar,

443:Mostly their troubles were minor ones, for they followed a healthy lifestyle, waking at sunrise to bathe in the river, then spending long hours in study or prayer, followed by daily chores, simple meals, storytelling ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,

444:Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community. ~ Parker J Palmer,

445:There has to be a reason of whether you look right or you bring the emotional or intellectual baggage of what's required for the storytelling. For me, it's not something I've aspired to say, "I'm going to be working in Hollywood." ~ Ciaran Hinds,

446:The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

447:If events occur to challenge and test us and we experience them only as a story to be recorded and sold, then have we lived? Have we matured? Or will we die fighting vaguely cheated and shortchanged by our storytelling vacation? ~ Chuck Palahniuk,

448:Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling. ~ Alec Soth,

449:We're [also] trying to talk to a generation who grew up on the Internet. They're digital natives, and, essentially, they speak through sequential storytelling. I mean, a good comic-book panel is not that much different than a meme. ~ Andrew Aydin,

450:For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do. ~ Thomas Sadoski,

451:Most people think its sex, money, and drugs but Hip-Hop is about lyrics, storytelling, and everybody having a different style. That's just another idea of beautiful, being yourself and creating music that represents you and what you like. ~ Rapsody,

452:My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for 'Twilight', although I got some in there. That was fun! There's just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups. ~ Melissa Rosenberg,

453:The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction. ~ Sara Sheridan,

454:To be honest, I found the 3D in 'Avatar' to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling. Technology aside, I wish 'Avatar' had been more original in its storytelling. ~ Mark Canton,

455:We have in our head something called story grammar. We see the world as a series of episodes rather than logical propositions... In our serious society, storytelling is seen as being soft. But people process the world through story. ~ Daniel H Pink,

456:But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem. ~ Jane Campion,

457:Don't despair for story's future or turn curmudgeonly over the rise of video games or reality TV. The way we experience story will evolve, but as storytelling animals, we will no more give it up than start walking on all fours. ~ Jonathan Gottschall,

458:I loved adventure movies. I loved movies where people went on an adventure to an unknown land, an undiscovered country, or a new territory. I think there's something, right at the center of storytelling, that people love about that. ~ Tom Hiddleston,

459:I wanted to do a book that was extremely suspicious of storytelling... it ("Embassytown") is very skeptical of the liberating potential of narrative. [I present] the idea that narrative may just as well be a shackle as [well] as a key. ~ China Mi ville,

460:Talking with friends about books harks back to the original impulse behind storytelling, the forging of human bonds. We have told ourselves stories not just, in Joan Didion's phrase, in order to live, but in order to live with one another. ~ Brian Hall,

461:There was once a child whose mother fell asleep. The end. Is that it? I said What else do you need to know? you said. Can't you tell me a little more about them? I said. (I was beginning to despair of your storytelling technique.) ~ Ali Smith,

462:And I don't mean that the storytelling that's out there shouldn't be happening. I just feel like that there's this huge imbalance with it all. Where are the shows that allow the entire family to sit down and enjoy something together? ~ Michael Landon Jr,

463:You have to think about good storytelling and characters first. Then hopefully, the rest of that stuff will follow, some more than others. But if you don't have a good film and strong characters, then you don't have anything down the road. ~ Pete Docter,

464:Like storytelling, that incessant loving rush of explaining and repositioning and telling again, all for the sake of finding something shared, something mutually recognized -- so interpreting seemed to me. It seemed a kind of goodness. ~ Leah Hager Cohen,

465:There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo...it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange. ~ Martin Scorsese,

466:It is our job to ruin the perfection of the empty page. It is our job to disrupt the status quo: because that’s what storytelling us. Taking a straight line and bending it, breaking it, shaping it into something far stranger and far greater. ~ Chuck Wendig,

467:I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment. ~ Karen Thompson Walker,

468:Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence. ~ Kevin Spacey,

469:Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying. ~ John Hodgman,

470:Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids. ~ Robert Redford,

471:There is a surprising amount of overlap between the storytelling and burlesque communities, maybe because they both, in a way, involve getting naked. People who choose to be vulnerable are rare. People who manage to do it well are even more so. ~ Mara Wilson,

472:Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn't come easy to everybody. It's a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them. ~ Austin Kleon,

473:I became an actress because I discovered the world of the imagination when I was about 14 or so and the concept that you could engage in this amazing world of storytelling. I saw a production of Hamlet, and I didn't know Hamlet died in the end. ~ Helen Mirren,

474:I feel like success to me is about feeling like I have done something in storytelling, where I've gotten close to articulating something intangible that I'm feeling, and I think I get closer every time, but I don't know that I've done that yet. ~ Brit Marling,

475:Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. ~ Stephen King,

476:If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think. ~ Ben Wheatley,

477:It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying ~ Michel Hazanavicius,

478:Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however...that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. ~ Stephen King,

479:I love creating partnerships; I love not having to bear the entire burden of the creative storytelling, and when I have unions like with George Lucas and Peter Jackson, it's really great; not only do I benefit, but the project is better for it. ~ Steven Spielberg,

480:everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened. ~ Julian Barnes,

481:I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats. ~ Jonathan Franzen,

482:If you trust that the people making the show love the source material and the characters, and it's a different medium and there are different requirements for long-form storytelling that will hopefully carry over a number of seasons, then it's exciting. ~ Greg Bryk,

483:I'm not a sci-fi lover; I wasn't from the start. So perhaps I miss that passion for other worlds, other dimensions, that sort of scope and that magnitude of storytelling; that's not my thing though I meet plenty of people whose thing it definitely is. ~ Paul McGann,

484:The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing. ~ David Shields,

485:I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing. ~ Dean Koontz,

486:I look for really great characters. I say great because as long as they're really good, there's something you can do. And really good storytelling. And when people ask me what the story is, I say it's really several stories really. They're intermeshed. ~ Matt Dillon,

487:Violence has been a part of storytelling forever and there's obviously a reason for it. Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones. I think there's something cathartic about having kids live through their fears through a book or any kind of story. ~ Jane Levy,

488:I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile. ~ Melissa Rosenberg,

489:Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe. ~ Henning Mankell,

490:The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had. ~ Ian McEwan,

491:A gifted storyteller should be able to tell their stories in different genres, mediums, and platforms. The art of storytelling is the same since civilization began. Only the way of telling it has changed because of technology. - Kailin Gow on Storytelling ~ Kailin Gow,

492:And it's only the beginning of a new era of exceptional Star Wars storytelling; next year we'll release our first standalone movie based on these characters, followed by Star Wars: Episode VIII in 2017, and we'll finish this trilogy with Episode IX in 2019. ~ Bob Iger,

493:Buildings for me represent opportunities of agency, transformation, and storytelling. They are not just artifacts. There is this big tradition of buildings-as-artifacts - constructed artifacts - but for me they are these incredible sites of negotiation. ~ David Adjaye,

494:I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story. ~ Oprah Winfrey,

495:Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect. ~ Douglas Coupland,

496:A big segment of the storytelling is about personal suffering. There’s the stink of catharsis. Of melodrama and memoir. A writer friend refers to this school as “the-sun-is-shining-the-birds-are-singing-and-my-father-is-on-top-of-me-again” literature. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,

497:All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world. ~ Carl Hiaasen,

498:As long as you still have one bridge left, nothing is lost. But from the moment that you cannot even understand the storytelling or the music of other cultures anymore, then we become strangers to each other and the situation will become very complicated. ~ Paulo Coelho,

499:Even though L.A Confidential box-office was a fraction of, say, Titanic or the Grinch movie, it finds its audience and will continue doing so for who knows how long, because of the basic thing we love about movies, which is storytelling and performances. ~ Curtis Hanson,

500:I was lucky enough to see the original cast of 'In the Heights.' This one blew my mind. The infusion of Latin, hip hop and rap with musical theatre, great storytelling and talent was a powerful combination to me during a time when I'd not been moved by much! ~ Josh Young,

501:The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. ~ Terry Pratchett,

502:I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance. ~ Simon Callow,

503:People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will. ~ Rosamond Lehmann,

504:This sucks on so many levels." Dialogue from "Jason X" Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought. ~ Roger Ebert,

505:I feel like there's lot of people who know finance and economics better than I do. There are lots of people who are better storytellers than I am. But the space that I occupy of storytelling about finance and economics is - more people want it than can do it. ~ David Plotz,

506:Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,

507:Good storytelling doesn't have to be in the form of the classics. It doesn't have to be revered by everybody. In fact, to me, the best storytelling is not universally loved by every single person. I think you can water down the ethicacy of the work, itself. ~ Bryan Cranston,

508:There are a lot of themes that I think are very compatible with Christian understanding . . . the themes of death, love, and sacrifice—these have been a part of good storytelling for ages and ages and ages, and certainly they are also very Christian themes. ~ Melissa Anelli,

509:I don't think there's a way to replace Stabler. The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.' ~ Danny Pino,

510:As much as I adore Agatha Christie - and I think people make this claim about murder mysteries in general - it's often a very conservative mode of storytelling. Usually it's the greedy, climbing, new-money slimeball who wants to take from the aristocracy. ~ Christopher Bollen,

511:I don't read or write SF for cutting edge ideas; I read and write it for the storytelling, and every story is new. So have I brought anything new to it? Only in so far as no-one before has written about the characters I've invented in their particular situation. ~ Erica Brown,

512:Steve was a genius with a flair for design, a shaman whose storytelling power could generate something magical and maleficent called a “reality distortion field”; he was a pompous jerk who disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection; ~ Brent Schlender,

513:Storytelling strengthens the imagination. To imagine is to envision, to see with the inward eye. This ability to imagine is the basis of all creativity. Creativity is being able to see beyond what is readily apparent. It is seeing a new answer to an old problem. ~ Carol Birch,

514:...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable—the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,

515:My job (and yours, if you decide this is a viable approach to storytelling) is to make sure these fictional folks behave in ways that will both help the story and seem reasonable to us, given what we know about them (and what we know about real life, of course). ~ Stephen King,

516:The ways in which a standardized language test induces storytelling, for example, is the opposite of creative writing; you have to learn a logical way to start a story, whereas in creative writing you may begin at the end or begin at the middle of the story. ~ Alejandro Zambra,

517:Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories. ~ Pam Allyn,

518:the secret sauce remains the same: The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

519:When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week. ~ Howard Gordon,

520:Yeah loads of bruises and welts, usually around the hip, arse, thigh region and elbows. Elbows got knocked up big time, but it was so much fun. I hadn't done a meaty action film in seven or eight years, so it was fun to explore that aspect of storytelling again. ~ Colin Farrell,

521:I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you're left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you're just left with rhythm. ~ Jack White,

522:In storytelling you kind of put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and look at it and recognize themselves inside it. So I feel that that in and of itself is a spiritual thing. ~ Holly Hunter,

523:'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters; to trust characters and hate other characters, but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling in my book. ~ Tatiana Maslany,

524:the DeMille films were foolishness. I was born to do this, and I can do it precisely because I thought the whole religion through when I broke away. It takes someone who knows—not believes—to capture and picture the storytelling truth about Moishe Rabenu in a film. ~ Herman Wouk,

525:Although I'm up for working in any genre, I do love the passion and dynamic storytelling that horror stories can provide. Dealing with big questions and possibilities of all sorts of stories with life and death consequences is enthralling and exhilarating to me. ~ Barbara Crampton,

526:If you know why someone is doing what they're doing, why they're behaving the way they are, then that's your job to reveal that, and often that's situational. The storytelling does that, and then some of it's your job as an actor to make that subtext come to life. ~ Cate Blanchett,

527:I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal,

528:Animation can be a full spectrum of different storytelling techniques and different genres. I think it's sad that there is only one audience that the studios are aiming for and that's the kid audience. It's really tragic that they don't' make films for older people. ~ Bill Plympton,

529:Certainly the goal with any sort of storytelling is to have an impact, to touch on some reader's life. And in some cases, there may be stories that actually have a particular goal like that in mind. So yeah, that sort of thing does happen in comics, fairly regularly. ~ Tom Brevoort,

530:Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre. ~ Andy Serkis,

531:But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress. ~ Keanu Reeves,

532:I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music?... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music. ~ Lady Gaga,

533:They're [zombies] us, you can also have the wrestler zombie, the clown zombie, the Jay Leno zombie and the nun zombie. I've never seen the clown werewolf or vampire. But because zombies are us, at the lowest possible level, they're a lot more versatile for storytelling. ~ Tom Savini,

534:I always find time to read novels and poetry as well as scripts; I like to enjoy different kinds of storytelling. I spend time at the beach and with my loved ones. I like traveling to unfamiliar places to challenge my perspectives and glean wisdom from other ways of life. ~ Rose McIver,

535:Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling. ~ David Farland,

536:I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer for awhile there. I had a good teacher at Interlochen, this arts' academy in Michigan, who taught me the importance of storytelling, and I really responded to that. It seemed like a long shot, but I always play the long odds. ~ Benjamin Walker,

537:It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling. ~ Sean Penn,

538:My love of storytelling comes from oral tradition, the stories from my grandmother and conversations with [my] mother. The world is full of discussions of condensation, drifts, misunderstanding, repetition. These are the materials I work with. My debt is to these women. ~ Lucrecia Martel,

539:I would say I was challenging the system quite. But I like to think that if the choices I make are slightly unexpected or challenging to people, then that is good. We are definitely three fairly like-minded people in terms of what we value in scripts and in storytelling. ~ Daniel Radcliffe,

540:I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty. ~ Eric Kripke,

541:Restrictions are a powerful thing. Although we often chafe at the limitations imposed by our marketing platforms, those limitations often bring out our storytelling creativity. That’s why we should all be paying close attention to Vine, the six-second looping-video platform ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

542:With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. ~ Bob Shacochis,

543:I think that's the way people absorb television. All the explanations in Doctor Who are there if that's your bag, but they're not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand — it's about making people care. ~ Steven Moffat,

544:I think the idea that television has evolved to this place of real thematic richness and the fact that you no longer have to get 10 million people to watch your show in order to propagate its survival are the best things that have ever happened to storytelling in this medium. ~ Damon Lindelof,

545:Audiences are less intrigued, honestly, by battle. They're more intrigued by human relations. If you're making a film about the trappings of the period, and you're forgetting that human relationships are the most engaging part of the storytelling process, then you're in trouble. ~ Ridley Scott,

546:The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that creativity will hit you all at once and the muse will carry you to the end of the book on feather wings while Foster the People plays gently in the background. Storytelling is work. Pleasurable work, usually, but it is work. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,

547:The Internet has been a great outlet for storytelling. After all, there are web-based shows that have started online and have then gotten picked up. I think it's a great opportunity for artists to get through the network roadblock. It just allows us another venue to be creative in. ~ Eva LaRue,

548:One of the things about being on Twitter, for me, is mostly about just being on the pulse of what people are interested in, what people are doing and what people are looking for. I look at entertainment projects and storytelling and I really try to think about what people want. ~ Ashton Kutcher,

549:Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that. ~ Danny Boyle,

550:The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy in our hands. When the first storyteller, having told the first story, fell silent, somebody sitting there by the fire said, "Then what happened?" and the Age of Sequels began. ~ Michael Chabon,

551:What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. ~ William Maxwell,

552:The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling. Don’t ever forget it, no matter what you learn here.* ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

553:Their storytelling grew richer. One evening, Ali was consumed by a memory. She saw three ripe lemons on the wooden cutting board in her mother’s kitchen, right down to the sunlight spangling off their pores. She heard her mother singing while they rolled pie dough in a storm of flour. ~ Jeff Long,

554:When I used to watch vaudevillian impressionists, people like Rich Little or Frank Gorshin, I always felt like the voice was the only point. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be of the Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters model, where observation and storytelling was important. ~ Frank Caliendo,

555:I definitely managed to do different kinds of things. My focus is usually who the director is, because at the end of the day the director is the storyteller, what the movie is all about. I don't want to participate in something that I don't think is constructive storytelling. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard,

556:One of the aspects I like about the film is that there is a kind of emotional, psychological discussion during the storytelling, ... Before taking a drug, go through yourself, experience yourself, all your hopes and fears in your own time. Before the pharmacology, do the psychology. ~ Keanu Reeves,

557:When I was 9 or 10, I used to get all the lead roles because I was the tallest person. But my interest in music soon drew me to country music. I was infatuated with the sound, with the storytelling. I could relate to it. I can't really tell you why. With me, it was just instinctual. ~ Taylor Swift,

558:Acting was definitely half of what I loved about storytelling and about theater. So, when I get a chance to do a cameo in a show or do a movie, it's a lot of fun and it's always great stepping outside of yourself and either playing a bizarro version of yourself or playing a character. ~ Josh Groban,

559:I'm not a big fan of kids' movies that have this knowing snarkiness to them or this post-modern take on storytelling. I think that sails right over the heads of most kids. There's something to be said for a well-told fairy tale. There's a reason that these mythic stories stay with us. ~ John C Reilly,

560:Lettering should be invisible. You shouldn't notice it, unless it is a determined piece of storytelling in graphic design. Whether handmade or digital, the lettering should be easy on the eye and well placed. It should help tell the story and do nothing to get in the way of it. ~ Brian Michael Bendis,

561:You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form. ~ John Updike,

562:I've had frustrated storytelling juices that have been lying dormant for a long time, and I guess the documentary was a way of me telling a story that I felt most qualified to tell. And I loved it, and I'd love to do something else someday, probably more narrative-based. But I'm in no rush. ~ Eric Bana,

563:Tightly-plotted, well-researched and beautifully drawn, this book is a real delight. Garen Ewing's mix of engaging characters, exciting old-school adventure, attractive ligne claire artwork and fluid storytelling makes The Rainbow Orchid easily one of the best graphic novels of the year. ~ Bryan Talbot,

564:It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership. ~ William Kittredge,

565:That's the thing about prep, is that it's a joy to have it there and you can spend all this time prepping, but ultimately you have to look at your script and turn up on the day. It's embedded in there somewhere but you have to forget it all and play the scene because we are storytelling. ~ Jenna Coleman,

566:A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. ~ Robert McKee,

567:I like being in real environments. I love being in the place that it's about - these sets and locations are characters in the movies. Can you imagine Breakfast at Tiffany's shot somewhere else? It's classic. Characters are part of storytelling; they're just as important as everything else. ~ Antoine Fuqua,

568:Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years. ~ Peter Stormare,

569:I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever. You can tell your story any way you damn well please. It’s your solo. ~ Jandy Nelson,

570:That's the thing - you do a job like 'Shameless,' and suddenly that's why you can get a job like 'The Virgin Queen', not because of all the classical theatre you've done. But we can be very snippy about television. It's absolutely the most potent and powerful form of storytelling we have. ~ Anne Marie Duff,

571:For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity. ~ Lynn Shelton,

572:I had a point of view, which was different. I looked at magic as theater, as storytelling, and I tried to have an approach that was different from what they were doing. "How can I move people and really get them to dream with a card trick, with coin magic, or even a piece of stage magic?" ~ David Copperfield,

573:I think we're in this exciting moment of Internet streaming storytelling, and it's anybody's guess what that is or what it means. It can take on any form. That's what's so exciting about the time we're in; these filmmakers are coming in and letting the story tell itself as it wants to be told. ~ Brit Marling,

574:The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it’s almost like not being alone. That morning our hero skipped in his skivvies down to the shore of the sea . . . it was dark . . . the fog . . . Storytelling! ~ Charles D Ambrosio,

575:There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story. ~ Richard Linklater,

576:Your gift with storytelling, Evie? It's not about you getting lost in your own mind, or living in a dreamland. It's about the beauty of your heart. It's about being able to rise above even the worst of situations. It's one of the reason I've loved you every single day since I was 11 years old. ~ Mia Sheridan,

577:It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories. ~ Jack D Zipes,

578:The only thing I would want to say is that storytelling is ancient; it's something that everybody does. Kids mustn't be in awe of it. Reading should be a joy - fun, fun, fun - not a responsibility, not something you do because society demands it, but something you do because it's a pleasure. ~ Natalie Babbitt,

579:He was charmed out of all reason as he watched her, this sandy, disheveled, storytelling mermaid, who seemed already to belong to him and yet wanted nothing to do with him. His heart worked in strange rhythms, as if it were struggling to adjust to a brand new metronome. What was happening to him? ~ Lisa Kleypas,

580:I'm very lucky to be able to work in print and radio. I'm very lucky to be able to work at a time when finance and economics are really important. And the number of people who tell finance and economic stories in a kind of accessible storytelling way, there's much more demand than there is supply. ~ David Plotz,

581:Individual storytelling is incredibly powerful. We as journalists know intuitively what scientists of the brain are discovering through brain scans, which is that emotional stories tend to open the portals, and that once there's a connection made, people are more open to rational arguments. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,

582:Star Trek' is the McDonald's of science fiction; it's fast food storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time, and you don't really have to get involved. It's all plastic. ~ David Gerrold,

583:I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come. ~ John Green,

584:Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary. ~ Theresa Rebeck,

585:All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious. ~ George Saunders,

586:Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about. ~ Kehinde Wiley,

587:I truly believe the appeal of my novel ranges in readers from ages 8 to 108. I always challenge myself in my storytelling to make certain that readers of all ages can connect with my character through her journey. I promise you will fall in love with Willow Krimble if you take the journey with her. ~ Giuseppe Bianco,

588:If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story. ~ John Lasseter,

589:I have totally hitched my wagon to the horse of storytelling, and the idea that none of us know why we're born, or why we're gonna die, or what we're planted here, or what's on the other side of the galaxy, or when time began, or when time end. The whole nature of reality is pretty up for grabs, really. ~ Ethan Hawke,

590:I love storytelling. If you strip all the bits away, what you'll find at the center is a storyteller. As I warm to my career and love it more, I have a sense that storytelling is healing, in many ways. You can reach an audience and heal, and by heal, I mean entertain and provoke. It's a wonderful life. ~ Ben Kingsley,

591:It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way. ~ Kevin Spacey,

592:My concern 99% is about the storytelling, the emotion and all this. I never think about the format of anything until way far in the process and when we arrive to the fabrication of the thing then we start to say, "Okay right, what is the best thing we can do." I choose the car before to choose the color. ~ Luc Besson,

593:One of the reasons humans tended toward insanity was the weight of fear they carried. The blessings of storytelling, the handing down of knowledge and warnings, had a flip side. People carried the collective fears of their history, the biases of those long dead, the paranoias of other ages. Anna flashed ~ Nevada Barr,

594:Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error. ~ Margaret Atwood,

595:As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling. ~ Karen Thompson Walker,

596:You can take the high moral ground intellectually, but if it ever happens to you personally, I don't know that I could honestly say that I wouldn't want to kill someone who took someone away from me. So, it's a rich, fertile ground for great characters and great storytelling. That was the impetus. ~ Richard LaGravenese,

597:It's remarkable how a soundtrack can be so important to the storytelling and the experience. I think the music is going to make people see the movie a lot. The music is going to make you want to go see it again. You have so much fun in the movie, and it's music that you want to share with your kids, anyway. ~ Vin Diesel,

598:I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all. ~ Alan Moore,

599:Some people feel like you need to have a very specialized understanding of music to have the authority to talk about it. They are such good directors that it's perfectly possible to have conceptual and directorial and storytelling conversations about music without needing to know all the technical pieces. ~ Henry Jackman,

600:Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history, people would gather around, whether by the fire or at a tavern, and tell stories. One person would chime in, then another, maybe someone would repeat a story they heard already but with a different spin. It's a collective process. ~ Joseph Gordon Levitt,

601:I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling ~ Michel Hazanavicius,

602:situation. But notice how Laura drew the story out of her son, letting him take an active role in the storytelling process. She acted primarily as a facilitator, helping get the facts of the event straight. This is how stories empower us to move forward and master the moments when we feel out of control. ~ Daniel J Siegel,

603:The language of logical argument, of proofs,is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling,moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the free language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. ~ Madeleine L Engle,

604:I don’t shout the loudest, and I’m quite shy, which was why I was reluctant to throw myself into the public eye. I love beauty, craftsmanship, storytelling and romance, and I probably don’t have the armor to survive the relentless competition that exists in this particular world. But I have my own toughness. ~ Sarah Burton,

605:I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s. ~ Bruce Feiler,

606:I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

607:Television is what we call the long form of storytelling, where we tell stories over thirteen, twenty-two, or twenty-four hours. Miniseries is an eight-hour form of storytelling, and film is a two-hour form. Each and every one of them are important to me, because they're a different modality of storytelling. ~ Grant Bowler,

608:Having certain limits - not too many, but certain limits on an ability to tell a story - makes us work harder, me and my writers. Sometimes I watch a giant movie with a $250 million budget and I think they feel kind of bloated, and that if they'd been leaner and meaner they might've had better storytelling. ~ Vince Gilligan,

609:Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly bend truths into stories that match their personal beliefs or those of their employers. ~ Lance Morcan,

610:I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery. ~ Sara Bareilles,

611:Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. ~ Henry Jenkins,

612:Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,

613:The power of storytelling lies in the passing on of messages, histories, and secrets . Empress Lihua and I worked on this cloak for you before she was even pregnant with you. She knew you would come. She knew you would face a challenge of this magnitude, as the tengaru had long foretold you would. ~ Julie C Dao,

614:The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time is really the stuff that interests me. ~ Steven Bochco,

615:Through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time. But you can’t get everybody to interpret the result in the same Way. And that’s thrilling to know – that everybody will see it differently. ~ Steven Spielberg,

616:Graphic novels might really speak to one child who's struggling with the other kinds of reading and might help them discover that storytelling is joyful and personal and illuminating. They might find your way in auditorily by listening to audio books in the car instead of playing Game Boys or watching DVDs. ~ Emma Walton Hamilton,

617:Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there. ~ David Levithan,

618:First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I'm endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why... and how they feel about it. Which means I'm interested in romance fiction. I was drawn to it, as both a reader and a writer, at the very beginning of my career. It's my kind of storytelling. ~ Debbie Macomber,

619:Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren't women. Wouldn't it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing? ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

620:In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story. ~ Yiyun Li,

621:once described fiction as a monumental lie that has to have the absolute ring of truth if it is to succeed. And that ring of truth invariably comes from research, which in turn gives a novel its authenticity. It is this kind of authenticity plus good storytelling that made Forever Amber a bestseller 56 years ago. Now ~ Kathleen Winsor,

622:Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. Weve lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us. ~ David Abram,

623:filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s story. I hope you’ll enjoy her and pull for her as ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

624:Our culture is set up on a feud mentality, or a "Housewives" mentality, that women just fight. And it's such a shallow way to exist as far as our evolution is concerned, and our culture is concerned. It's fun to watch women fight, in a storytelling way, but in the world, women shouldn't be seen as a threat to other women. ~ Laura Linney,

625:Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? ~ Roland Barthes,

626:Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay,

627:If I am a fan of my own music, which I am, I want to hear the best Madchild I can hear. What am I missing? I sort of had a good talk with some close friends of mine that I really respect and look up to in music as well and we all just came to the conclusion, just some more storytelling songs of things I have gone through. ~ Shane Bunting,

628:I know what the value [of storytelling] is to me -- varied and huge, giving me everything from delight, to knowledge, to access to friends and colleagues, a desirable identity through valued work, escape from pain, and a steady income. Not bad, for something so intangible as making and selling dream-by-number kits. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold,

629:There are a number of times when we have found, there's a number of old-school special effects in here that are fantastic, but there are definitely some times that we went digital and you're not going to tell the difference, I don't think. I think it just serves the storytelling because that's just the era that we live in. ~ Kimberly Peirce,

630:I think that at the end of the day I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the New York Times crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it. ~ Damon Lindelof,

631:Of course, the writer can impose control; It's just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however... that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. ~ Stephen King,

632:Too often we fall into the trap of thinking that if we give employees the facts and explain why change needs to take place from an economic point of view, they’ll buy into the change. We overestimate the power of logic and underestimate the power of storytelling, an appeal to belonging and the positive emotions of belonging. ~ Judith E Glaser,

633:It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film. ~ Rowan Atkinson,

634:Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre. ~ David Gemmell,

635:It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours. ~ Henning Mankell,

636:I think it's always a challenge when you're telling a story that people know. But hopefully, good storytelling - well, there's two things. One is, you definitely have to have surprises and changes so that people are - you keep them interested, you take them down roads that they didn't expect and give them suspense and surprise. ~ Kimberly Peirce,

637:The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time. ~ Steven Spielberg,

638:I’ve always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There’s no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word. ~ Shannon Hale,

639:The teacher always used me as an example to the class of good English and good storytelling because we all had to write the same stories. But she used to make me go out front - which I hated - and read my story to the class and I would get huge applause. Not because of who I was but because they truly enjoyed the stories I wrote. ~ Michael Jackson,

640:I feel like the big twist shows are now off the table. I think Westworld was probably the last one to Trojan horse this idea of the young man in black. They were doing non-linear storytelling, but disguising it. Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy have spoken openly about how they just didn't think people were going to figure it out that fast. ~ Damon Lindelof,

641:In my work, there is a lot of storytelling. The storytelling is not a new thing. Back in the [Howard] Thurston days, the [Harry] Houdini days, the [Harry] Blackstone days, it was stories, but the stories were, "We're going to the Egyptian temples, and we're going to vanish the Prince of Thebes," and, "On my last trip to the Orient ..." ~ Judd Apatow,

642:But in other aspects of our lives, I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

643:No woman or man is any one thing and the men in my stories, well, some of them are good and some of them are terrible, and most of them make the lives of the women they love much harder than need be. Why? Because that's the kind of storytelling I was drawn to when I wrote these stories, most of which are at least seven years or more old. ~ Roxane Gay,

644:I really love animation as a storytelling medium, whether it's traditional, cel animation, or CG, or stop motion, which is more our studio's area of focus. But I find that the creatives behind any kind of animation are typically very similar, and so regardless of what aesthetic they use to realize their vision, I'm usually pretty into it. ~ Seth Green,

645:He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

646:The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t. ~ Jonathan Gottschall,

647:All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence. ~ William Butler Yeats,

648:I'm really inspired right now by a lot of the actors and actresses who are pursuing storytelling outside of just acting. They're writing, producing, they are creating their own material. That's really exciting to me. It feels like the possibilities are endless as far the things that you can make and even where they can be shown. ~ Cynthia Addai Robinson,

649:Really, for me, it's important to know who's pitching and who's catching - just what that scene is supposed to accomplish in terms of storytelling. That being said, on the day, basically what you're trying to get yourself into an open place. And if the character is in a state of anxiety or vulnerability, you try to find some touchstone. ~ Susan Sarandon,

650:The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch,

651:I think that the reason you keep hearing that it's the golden age of TV is because original storytelling is happening all the time in that medium, and people are hungry for it. And I'm as guilty as anyone for being part of an industry that is capitalizing on existing stories, sequels, these things that we are seeing again and again and again. ~ J J Abrams,

652:The love and support from the Witches of East End fans continues to blow us away and renews our faith that storytelling matters, strong female characters matter, and messages about faith and hope matter. I love this family. I love this story. And to be part of a show that has inspired and touched so many people's hearts is a true blessing. ~ Rachel Boston,

653:That's just how I see things on a base level: there's so much going on. Or at least I like to have that feeling. It's part of being interested in notions of reality apart from storytelling. I don't know if it has something to do with having an art school education, which makes you aware of the way visuals speak, or makes you trust them more. ~ Jane Campion,

654:I like to multitask. I love the process of the storytelling in television. I love the serial. Even my stab at doing a procedural show was still very much serialized. I'm such a serialized storyteller. I feel like the story never ends. I want it to go and go and go. However, with cable and streaming now it's endless. You can do anything. ~ Kevin D Williamson,

655:I would rather not write if I'm depressed, or am going through a breakup, or I've had some disappointment, or I'm having a family issue. You don't want to just put out an open wound. Sometimes that just isn't even really good writing. Good writing should be good writing and storytelling and not just therapy or someone's personal journal. ~ Mandy Stadtmiller,

656:I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has. ~ Bradford Cox,

657:I think that the idea of boundaries is being challenged everywhere. And I think our fascination with sci-fi is that it is a boundary-less world where we can kind of create the reality that we believe to be as opposed to the reality that is. It is about the beyond and the unknown in a different way than pretty much any type of storytelling is. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal,

658:Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it's going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What's actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It's more about what's going to happen between the characters and what's taking place in the story. ~ Charlie Jane Anders,

659:If you do really good storytelling, things that people also might anticipate and that they might have seen before - there's a reason we go back to stories that we love - so, even if there is a familiarity, if you can do it a different way and hopefully do it well enough, you actually feel the satisfaction of that anticipation given back to you. ~ Kimberly Peirce,

660:You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that. ~ Aleksandar Hemon,

661:So where should we go at it?' asked Bastian. 'Anywhere you want me,' I murmured, dreamily. 'Pardon?' 'Anywhere,' I said. 'Why don't we start in a familiar place, so we are not nervous our first time?' I have to remind myself that this is real, and not part of the daydream. He's talking about the Storytelling Project. Not sex. ~ Megan McCafferty,

662:If in this address I were to summon all the writers to whom I owe a few things or a great deal, their shadows would plunge us into darkness. They are innumerable. In addition to revealing the secrets of the storytelling craft, they obliged me to explore the bottomless depths of humanity, admire its heroic deeds and feel horror at its savagery. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa,

663:Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, “This is boring.” An hour later you could decide that it was the best thing you’d ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling. ~ David Sedaris,

664:We want to do things that are interesting, great storytelling, some of it is gonna be more fun and funny, some of it is more serious and talking about interesting issues that we think are provocative and interesting to us. Kind of on a more political level. But, you know, just things that we find interesting that we think stories that need to be told. ~ John Legend,

665:When people get up on the stage and say, "I've got AIDS," or "I'm in recovery," gosh, it's hard for them. It's like that story touches every person's story. You know, they open their entire humanity up. Storytelling is very important in life. Telling the truth is critical. It's like, again, the melody. The melody of jazz music is the truth, for me. ~ Cecil Williams,

666:A Crime So Monstrous is a remarkably brave and unflinching piece of reportage and storytelling. Ben Skinner bears witness, sharing stories so unsettling, so neglected, so chilling they will leave you shaking with anger. This should be required reading for policy makers around the world - and, for that matter, anyone concerned about the human condition. ~ Alex Kotlowitz,

667:The nature that is in the location of my films can be seen in my photography, and I want my films to become closer to my photography and more distant from storytelling. It is true that these are completely separate milieus, but in my opinion, the ideal situation for me is for these two areas - photography and cinema - to become closer to one another. ~ Abbas Kiarostami,

668:I was desperately unhappy with it [Blade Runner]. I was compelled by contract to record five or six different versions of the narration, each of which was found wanting on a storytelling basis. The final version was something that I was completely unhappy with. The movie obviously has a very strong following, but it could have been more than a cult picture. ~ Harrison Ford,

669:John Cassavetes' films have really altered the way I see film and acting and storytelling and emotion and love, so I see acting as this incredible revealing of human nature and this means of telling our story, sharing our voice with the world. That's what acting is for me. It allows for people to experience things through the character, through the story. ~ Tatiana Maslany,

670:The great thing about television is that you get to tell, like with "The Walking Dead", 16 hours worth of character-driven storytelling in less time than it takes to make a feature film. So, it really is a medium at least for storytellers who are passionate about not only the genre but also the character-driven genre stories. It's probably a better medium. ~ Gale Anne Hurd,

671:The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself. ~ Tim O Brien,

672:There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others. ~ Aleksandar Hemon,

673:For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness. ~ Gloria Steinem,

674:I love crosscut parallel storytelling, like we did in Blue Valentine. I love how Alejandro González Iñárritu has done it, and Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, and all the way back to D.W. Griffith - this parallel editing is an effective way to tell stories. It's like juggling, like keeping a lot of balls in the air and seeing how they come down. ~ Derek Cianfrance,

675:I think change is happening in ways we can't anticipate yet because the whole generation of viewers who are viewing films - film may not be the appropriate word in years to come. I'm excited about the possibility of new types of storytelling; that to me is less daunting. I'm excited by how we'll evolve with those formats thematically, tonally and in narrative. ~ Simon Kinberg,

676:Storytelling is at the heart of life... In finding our own story, we assemble all the parts of ourselves. Whatever kind of mess we have made of it, we can somehow see the totality of who we are and recognize how our blunderings are related. We can own what we did and value who we are, not because of the outcome but because of the soul story that propelled us. ~ Marion Woodman,

677:Singling out “women’s fiction” for genre derision never fails to piss me off. Somehow worse when women do it. Case in pt: Editor says crowd-sourcing editorial for romance & erotica not bad idea b/c “no great artistry at stake” Yes, genre fiction not high art. But it’s a craft we take seriously, writing for love of storytelling, not writing whatever sells. ~ Kelley Armstrong,

678:To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally. ~ John Shelby Spong,

679:For me, the best journalism is usually the best storytelling, and the best stories are those of real people. Sometimes those real people are people in positions of great prominence or power or adverse situations, and sometimes it's just normal folks who help illuminate a situation, a place, a culture. And for me, that's always been the best way of telling a story. ~ Jason Rezaian,

680:Hopping around time in a non-linear storytelling fashion (on 'Lost') allows you to bring back characters who are dead and, in some cases, buried. Now that time travel is the story itself, it opens up even more doors. So when an actor reads that they're getting killed off on the show, they're basically, like, 'Okay, but should I still bother to show up next week?' ~ Damon Lindelof,

681:I believe, when it comes to storytelling ... that mistakes are often the beginning of the best ideas. After all, a mistake wasn't planned. It can't be a cliché. All you have to do is think of a reason why the mistake isn't a mistake at all, and you might have something fresh and wonderful, something to stimulate a story you never thought of quite that way before. ~ Orson Scott Card,

682:Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart. ~ Alice Walker,

683:(1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. ~ Donald Miller,

684:Chad Michael Ward is a master of the storytelling craft. His imagery, both still and moving, reaches deep into the darkest corners of the mind, combining the macabre and the sensuous Revealing humanity's secret daydream atrocities. CMW taps into our most excitable of emotions with a blend of fear and human sexuality. Like an erotic car accident we can not look away from. ~ Dave Navarro,

685:A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables. A storyteller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns. Like the word “hekayah” story, fable, news, hakawati is derived from the Lebanese word “haki”, which means talk or conversation. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling. ~ Rabih Alameddine,

686:Some of the most successful, talented actresses of our generation, be it Julianne Moore, or Charlize Theron, or Charlotte Gainsbourg, or Isabella Rossellini, if you know your cinema history, have taken their clothes off. There's nothing wrong with nudity, per se, if it's part of the storytelling and it's eloquent and it says something about the raw humanity of the story. ~ Natalie Dormer,

687:Protest is telling the truth in public. Sometimes protest is telling the truth to a public that isn’t quite ready to hear it. Protest is, in its own way, a storytelling. We use our bodies, our words, our art, and our sounds both to tell the truth about the pain that we endure and to demand the justice that we know is possible. It is meant to build and to force a response. ~ DeRay Mckesson,

688:The confusion between these two diverse human activities—inventing stories and following traces in order to find something—is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night’s storytelling. The ~ Carlo Rovelli,

689:I love my work. What's more fun than playing with imagination? I also believe storytelling is the most powerful way people communicate with one another, interpret our lives, share our dreams, even form our futures. So when I sit down to write every day, I keep the fun, and also what I consider a large cultural project that connects people, at the center of what I'm doing. ~ Lucy Jane Bledsoe,

690:That's just me wanting that supernatural tool to tell a story and also not wanting to be restricted by reality, with how we're telling a tale, because we are a heightened reality on Hannibal. There is a larger-than-life quality to the storytelling when it gets into particulars. I like the idea of being able to dismiss reality, depending on if we can sell it as part of the story. ~ Bryan Fuller,

691:You can put the camera in places where you may not necessarily be able to put it there if I don't do the stunt. If it's character and it's storytelling, then we do it. We design the things around me. I don't do it just to do a stunt. It's storytelling for me and how I can best bring the audience into the action, bring the audience into the story. And that's how we always look at at. ~ Tom Cruise,

692:The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence. ~ Adrienne Rich,

693:Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human. ~ Richard Kearney,

694:She wondered what it was about storytelling that made people want it almost as much as food and water, even more so in bad times than good. Movies had never drawn more patrons than during the Great Depression. Book sales often improved in a recession. The need went beyond a mere desire for entertainment and distraction from one's troubles. It was more profound and mysterious than that. ~ Dean Koontz,

695:The way that people are watching TV is changing. The landscape of television is changing. Movies are becoming much more insular. They're like a walled garden, where you know what you're going to see and you expect it. But in the world of TV, because it's episodic, you can explore any area because you have time to do that. You can take risks on the kinds of storytelling that you're doing. ~ Seth Gabel,

696:Well, I kind of approach both of them similarly in (that) I always see it as a movie first because that's my background. Cindy Kelley, who has been my writing partner on my novels, she works more on the prose side and the description side of the storytelling because, obviously, there's a lot more of that in a novel than in a screenplay. You only have up to 120 pages in a screenplay. ~ Michael Landon Jr,

697:The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others. The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.) Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses. ~ Margaret Atwood,

698:You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me. ~ Khaled Hosseini,

699:This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

700:I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen. ~ Robert Ludlum,

701:You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work. ~ George Lucas,

702:Any platform that you use to tell stories helps you regardless of the medium regardless if they are bedtime stories that you tell your children or comics or film. Specifically what makes comics unique is that they are a storytelling device that forces you to think both visually and economically. Some might say you are limited by your imagination, but that is not true because someone has to draw it. ~ Jeph Loeb,

703:Digging up new information and speculating on it isn't your primary purpose when you're writing a biography intended for young readers, unless you find compelling evidence that departs from the accepted wisdom. A biography for young people calls for the demanding art of distillation, the art of storytelling, and your responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the documented record. ~ Russell Freedman,

704:I guess storytelling's always been in my blood. My mom said I was always dressing up and jumping in front of the camera and putting on plays. There must be a part of me that has to express that. If we were living in prehistoric clans, I'd probably be sitting by the campfire taking two stones and showing you how dinosaurs were chasing us. I'd be the one finding a way to communicate and perform. ~ Amber Valletta,

705:What I think networks do so well are big, fun, accessible, invite everybody into the tent kinds of storytelling, akin to an early Spielberg movie or a Michael Crichton novel. That's not to say that there aren't scary parts 'cause there are, and that there aren't sexy parts and edgy parts, just like early Spielberg would have, but there's a lot of heart, a lot of emotion and complicated characters. ~ Eric Kripke,

706:Among the many fox magics her sobo had delighted in describing, the one that had most captured her imagination was the power to alter form. The most eldritch among foxes could turn (or so her grandmother would claim in that musical croak that was her storytelling voice) into human beings. The they would creep into the lives of lonely and impressionable souls and offer them long-sought affection. ~ Ali Shaw,

707:Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other. ~ Kathleen Norris,

708:This new way of consuming information and storytelling online doesn’t bode well for individuals or companies that create mediocre content and cookie-cutter storytelling. The new mentality says that if it’s not good or important, the group won’t share it. Furthermore, it no longer matters who created the content; if it doesn’t satisfy us, we’re not going to share or filter something up the food chain. ~ Nick Bilton,

709:This one’ll keep you humble, Tavish, no mistakin’. A handsome man needs that in his life near about as much as anything else at all.” Granny emphasized the declaration with a firm nod. “So”—she lowered her voice to an overly loud whisper—“go sit next to her again, will you? Storytelling’s a good time for a little snuggling.” “Is there anything you need, Granny, before I have me a ‘little snuggling’? ~ Sarah M Eden,

710:But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule. ~ Damon Lindelof,

711:Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing. ...I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now. ~ Bruce Hornsby,

712:Absent Holmes, the Watson storytelling approach is the natural, instinctive one. And absent Holmes’s insistence, it is incredibly difficult to resist our desire to form narratives, to tell stories even if they may not be altogether correct, or correct at all. We like simplicity. We like concrete reasons. We like causes. We like things that make intuitive sense (even if that sense happens to be wrong). ~ Maria Konnikova,

713:When unconscious storytelling becomes out default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships--we've got the story on repeat. Burton explains that our brains like predictable storytelling. He writes, "In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear. ~ Bren Brown,

714:From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media - where old and new media converge by involving fans - is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator - or the brands that back them. ~ Henry Jenkins,

715:Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things. ~ Nikki Giovanni,

716:From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. ~ Walter Benjamin,

717:I see the carpet reflecting that narratological structure of the storytelling, with Scheherazade as the outside frame story on the outside, with the stories woven on the inside. It's also demonstrative of the infinity of it, with no beginning and no end. The carpet is also a kind of metonym for cinema, this idea that the flat surface carries a terrific depth of imaginative field while remaining totally flat. ~ Marina Warner,

718:Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole. ~ China Mi ville,

719:The ending lights up like Baghdad during the war and your jaw drops and the curtains close and you feel a part of something much bigger and much weirder than yourself -- the mighty power of storytelling, a power embodied by the conclusion of narrative. The ending to any story is a potent moment, a super-charged dose of a story's capability to make you feel something and to leave you reeling, wondering, feeling. ~ Chuck Wendig,

720:Jesus invites us into a story that is bigger than ourselves, bigger than our culture, bigger even than our imaginations, and yet we get to tell that story with the scandalous particularity of our particular moment and place in time. We are storytelling creatures because we are fashioned in the image of a storytelling God. May we never neglect the gift of that. May we never lose our love for telling the tale. ~ Rachel Held Evans,

721:Honorata asked me to accompany her to visit the group of widows she supported. “They need to give you their stories for their own healing,” she said. This notion of “giving” stories was new, but I would soon learn the power of bearing witness and of transferring pain through storytelling. By listening and acknowledging the truths of those women, I had the honor of playing a miniscule part in their healing. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz,

722:Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

723:In the shows I've done serialized storytelling with, there are big open questions, but you like every episode to be identifiable as what it is. It's also very important that each season is identifiable. There's usually some big thing that you're trying to wrap up. There are big bows that you're trying to tie, by the end of the season, that you would do anyway because it's just good storytelling to tie those things up. ~ Tim Kring,

724:Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend -- make believe -- it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge. ~ Laurie Frankel,

725:The biggest compliment? I would say, "You helped me." I think in terms of life, not just with acting. But certainly with storytelling, being able to hold up a mirror and allow someone to relate to a story and see something in themselves to the extent that you're in service to another human being - I don't know why else we're here. To know that I helped someone would be the biggest compliment I could ever receive. ~ Thomas Sadoski,

726:I always thought that I could write a novel. In my case, it was misguided. I do believe that the best nonfiction is not "literary journalism," a misleading term, but rather journalism that asks the questions that serious literature asks. It's storytelling that happens to be true. So I don't think it was a missed opportunity. After awhile you learn what you're really good at. Life is short, so spend time doing that. ~ Ron Rosenbaum,

727:If you're a real writer, you infuse your characters with truths from your own life. The old saw is, Write What You Know. I think it equally appropriate to add. Write Who You Are. Give your readers little insights into how you think. Share your feelings and beliefs in a way that makes other question their own, thereby requiring them in some small way to reevaluate their lives. Good storytelling compels us to do this. ~ Terry Brooks,

728:I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do that. We want to be sucked into the events, suspend our disbelief and imagine that this is a fiction, but actually putting onscreen the gap between who the people are and who they want to be and therefore opening the question about why they want to be this person. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer,

729:My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations.... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)] ~ Pierre Berton,

730:There are two magic acts I want to pull off when I write. One is creating a feeling that when you're inside a book, you believe everything you're reading even when you know it's not true. And the second is an extension of that, which is you know it's not true, you know it's not real, but you believe it anyway. And it's that believing of the story that isn't real that attracted me to writing and storytelling in general. ~ Markus Zusak,

731:Audiences will see what they want to see. Some will come out, hopefully enjoying two hours of action. Some people will find themselves gravitating towards the emotional dilemma that the characters find themselves in. Other people will see that there is some layer of subversions to the storytelling aspect of poking a finger of judgment at certain governments to the idea of foreign invasion, others maybe false pretenses. ~ Colin Farrell,

732:We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better. ~ Dan Ariely,

733:All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. ~ William Zinsser,

734:I may love individual people, but I am contemptuous of the arrogance , and in a way, it's both ruined me and fuels me. It's ruined me because nobody cares about these issues, and then it's the source of most of my storytelling now, because I am so preoccupied with it. It fuels me, because this is my outrage. I do believe in that great tradition of literature and storytelling. You know, the downfall and the folly of it all. ~ Larry Fessenden,

735:We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Becauwse we really don't lov what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ... Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. ~ Harry Crews,

736:Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques. ~ Danny Boyle,

737:My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling. ~ George Saunders,

738:When we come back to fantasy, I think we're actually coming back to the real bedrock of storytelling. Our national or international genre really is fantasy, if you think about the worldwide myths and legends and stories that we all know, whether we're talking about Little Red Riding Hood or the Arabian Nights or Noah's Ark or Hercules. These are stories that cross many cultures in much the same way that dragons cross many cultures. ~ Robin Hobb,

739:I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader. ~ James McBride,

740:The holiday season is a time for storytelling, and whether you are hearing the story of a candelabra staying lit for more than a week, or a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision, these stories often feature miracles. Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you'd see, and this holiday story features any number of miracles, depending on your point of view. ~ Daniel Handler,

741:Humans are storytelling creatures preeminently. We organize the world as a set of tales. How, then, can a person make any sense of his confusing environment if he cannot comprehend stories or surmise human intentions? In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature. ~ Oliver Sacks,

742:I think television has become such an interesting place for characters and for incredible storytelling. Half of what I watch are television shows that I've become obsessed with. I just think that it's opened up so much, to be such an interesting and creative medium, and so many wonderful directors and actors are moving to television because it is a great medium for telling stories and for creating a character over a long period of time. ~ Elijah Wood,

743:I want to do a stripped-down album. That style is actually where my heart is - storytelling and just letting the voice and the lyrics talk for themselves. I still want to write the perfect song and sing it in the most honest, undressed way. But I feel like I have to gather more experiences and more layers in my voice. I have to live more to be able to tell this tale. So I'm saving my folk record. I have a feeling nobody will understand it. ~ Lykke Li,

744:I think acting came later in life when I went to college. I started out there. I wasn't a big star in the school plays or anything. I guess I just really liked stories. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives. Film and theater are very powerful storytelling mediums. You sit in a dark room and enter another world. I love that as a member of the audience, and I sort of wanted to get on the other side. ~ Rachel Weisz,

745:whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

746:My real purpose in telling middle-school students stories was to practice telling stories. And I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times. And the way I would justify it to the head teacher if he came in or to any parents who complained was, look, I'm telling these great stories because they're part of our cultural heritage. I did believe that. ~ Philip Pullman,

747:The idea of suggesting that Hannibal Lecter - in the book, he has a sixth finger and red eyes, and so there is a devilry in Thomas Harris' presentation - so it felt like it was completely honest and appropriate for the character. And we often talk in the writers' room, "Okay, there is the Hannibal as the devil explanation of that plot point, but we also need to ground that in a reality that is answerable to the physics of the storytelling." ~ Bryan Fuller,

748:I love dealing with drama. I'm drawn to the painful side of storytelling, more so. I feel like that's where you get the most honesty from. My laughter comes from irony. You laugh at my pain. I can't look for the laugh 'cause I'll fall flat on my face. I like the type of laughter that comes from irony like, "Of course, it's sunny today when I wore a mink coat!" I'm that guy. I was raised on Benny Hill and The Odd Couple and The Honeymooners. ~ Michael K Williams,

749:I'm an actor, so I'm interested in the pursuit of storytelling and character and challenging myself and expanding my craft. That's not something that ever ends, because as you grow as a person, so does your capacity to play different characters. New things come up, new things you want to explore and new stories you want tell about life and your knowledge of things. I don't think there's ever going to be that satisfaction of "and now, comfort." ~ Tatiana Maslany,

750:I've been making 16mm urban landscape films about San Francisco for many years. I choose different nonfiction themes to investigate and am generally interested in surfacing lesser-known histories. I like to investigate and illuminate these histories, combining them with my own unconventional storytelling style, which is generally a stream-of-consciousness voiceover involving a steady stream of personal reflections on pining over unavailable women. ~ Jenni Olson,

751:I've been training like crazy with my trainer Decker Davis all the time, and we've been doing this new thing called Danger Train. It's kind of storytelling about the offseason training, there's a lot more to come with that. More than anything, from a nutrition aspect to the speed aspect to the strengthening aspect and, most importantly, to the mental aspect, we're always trying to grow exponentially. We're continuing to find new ways to do that. ~ Russell Wilson,

752:―Yeah, but what about the ritual of getting your ticket and your snacks, finding the perfect seat, ―I countered.― All those strangers watching the movie with you, they change how you see it, you know? You should hear their gasps and laughter and sniffling. It’s a communal experience. You can’t get that on your laptop or phone. That sharing, it’s the foundation of storytelling. It reminds us that we’re… ―What? ―Human. Humans who need other humans ~ Libba Bray,

753:It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. [...] And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is an implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. That is so untrue that it makes me want to cry--or laugh. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

754:Descriptions of dreams have a dubious place in storytelling. For these are dreams which have been imagined--'dreamed up', to be slotted in. A story can be made up. How can a dream be made up? By not rising of its own free will from the unconscious it sets a note of falsity, merely illustrating something 'dream-like', which may be why dream descriptions within stories seen curiously meaningless. To avoid glazing over, best then to turn the page quickly. ~ Murray Bail,

755:But there was a catalyst, an event, a moment which changed everything and not just for us. This is good for storytelling but bad for decision making, and it is frightening to look back and realize, were it not for that moment, all of our lives would have been so different. maybe that's revisionist history. Maybe it's me making origin myths. But I can't shake the conviction that Jason's boyfriend's friend's ex-boyfriend's girlfriend changed the world. ~ Laurie Frankel,

756:We believe the explanation we hear last. It's one of the ways in which narrative influences our perception of truth. We crave finality, and end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storytelling ruse. The device runs contrary to experience, wouldn't you say? Time never simplifies - it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken. ~ Michelle de Kretser,

757: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,

758:I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose. ~ Sol Stein,

759:I'm seeing more and more interesting horror come my way. More and more interesting thrillers and genre films are coming my way from the studio level, and they're financed and they have movie stars attached and all of that. But a lot of times, the storytelling just doesn't speak to me. It feels like it's still oftentimes coming out of a kind of prescribed notion of normalcy, prescribed notion of gender roles. There's not a lot of "new" seeming to be happening. ~ Karyn Kusama,

760:I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent. ~ Lucy Corin,

761:Growing up, I was constantly reminded to not to air our family's dirty laundry. Part of why domestic violence is allowed to continue is because there is often an unwritten rule in many families of abuse: Don't ask. Don't tell. Keeping quiet does no good. I found that sharing my story liberated me from my past. There is power in storytelling and, in that, healing. Owning my truth also empowered me. I will no longer be manipulated or controlled by guilt or shame. ~ Kambri Crews,

762:you. Once again, my new novel The Girl Who Stayed is something different for me, although with the same voice my readers have come to anticipate. I believe that people are pretty much the same, regardless of era, physical space, or culture, and this is the essence of my storytelling. I strive for characters you will relate to, no matter where or when they may have lived. The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

763:/Farsi Rise early at dawn, when our storytelling begins. In the dead of the night, when all other doors are locked, the door for the Lovers to enter opens. Be wide awake in the dark when Lovers begin fluttering around the Beloved's window, like homing pigeons arriving with flaming bodies. [1472.jpg] -- from Nobody, Son of Nobody: Poems of Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, Translated by Vraje Abramian ~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, Rise early at dawn, when our storytelling begins ,

764:Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey--and returned. ~ Jasper Fforde,

765:Film is such a director's medium; you're really in their hands in terms of the real storytelling. As an actor, you can give a performance moment to moment and some of your takes will be used and some of them won't. I think there are great films you can make with bad performances, and vice versa. There are all combinations of those things. It's really down to the director what happens, I think, so that's why it's really good to work with very talented, bold directors. ~ Rachel Weisz,

766:The left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior. ~ David Eagleman,

767:The incomparable James Walvin has done it again: he has crafted a beautifully written and deeply informed single volume history of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences on three continents. This book is full of fresh ideas and astounding detail; it is at once great storytelling, punctuated with real people and voices, and an unblinking analysis of numerous great questions and paradoxes about the power of slavery in creating the Atlantic world over four centuries. ~ David W Blight,

768:First, the skill of storytelling helps to galvanize your team. Second, the discipline of storytelling requires leaders to be clear about their intentions and to prioritize what fits into the story versus secondary goals and issues. Third, there is possibly an artifact here - great storytellers can make their exploits and achievements sound very exciting and memorable. Successful leaders who are not good storytellers won't get the acknowledgement and appreciation they deserve. ~ Gary A Klein,

769:Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, “That is not interesting. ~ Sean Carroll,

770:Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration. ~ Steven Kotler,

771:The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

772:All war is based in deception (cfr. Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”). Definition of deception: “The practice of deliberately making somebody believe things that are not true. An act, a trick or device entended to deceive somebody”. Thus, all war is based in metaphor. All war necessarily perfects itself in poetry. Poetry (since indefinable) is the sense of seduction. Therefore, all war is the storytelling of seduction, and seduction is the nature of war. ~ Pola Oloixarac,

773:Pulitzer's Gold is a goldmine of inspiration for both journalists and non-journalists. Those in the newspaper business, who now find themselves obsessing about staff cutbacks and circulation declines, should embrace this book as a reminder of the highest ideals, and the absolute thrills, to be found in their profession. As for regular readers, Pulitzer's Gold offers marvelous storytelling, real-life adventures, and absolute proof that journalism can change our world for the better. ~ Jeffrey Zaslow,

774:There's a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need," Morrie said. "You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don't need the latest sports car, you don't need the biggest house. The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?...Offering others what you have to give...I don't mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It's not so hard. ~ Mitch Albom,

775:It might sound crazy, but filming in a conflict zone, in Afghanistan, and being a female filmmaker was the easy part. I found people open and understanding of the importance and beauty of filmic storytelling. I never had to explain why Jake Bryant, my Director of Photography, and I were climbing up a ladder to get a high shot, or running ahead to get an arrival shot, or filming weeks after weeks, months after months, collecting so much material. The process was respected and honored. ~ Pietra Brettkelly,

776:This is our story to tell. He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way: profoundly. You'd think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven't. I've never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always feel like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in ita telling whatsoever. You can tell your story any way you damn well please. It's your solo. ~ Jandy Nelson,

777:I think that's why it's difficult for women when they watch TV and we see one version of a woman who is attached at the hip to a guy, and that's kind of her whole thing. You kind of go, 'I don't relate to this, I don't feel this.' You know? Maybe somebody does, but not everyone. That's the other thing about storytelling, is you can't represent everybody. You know, you can't seek to do that. You have to tell stories that you're interested in talking about and characters that intrigue you. ~ Tatiana Maslany,

778:If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or memoir. If you don't want to make that claim - if that's not what's important to you; if you're more interested in storytelling and interiority and interpersonal relationships than in objective, checkable facts about the world - then why wouldn't you call it a novel, and take advantage of what that gets you, of the extra freedom, of belonging to the tradition of the novel? ~ Elif Batuman,

779:The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

780:I wanted to be an actor ever since I was five. My grandparents - my mom's parents in New York - were stage actors. I think indirectly I wanted to do it because of them. My grandfather would tell me stories about Tennessee Williams and actors he worked with in New York. He had such a respect for acting and such a love for storytelling about that world. I grew up hearing him tell tales of it.They were never encouraging me or discouraging me to take part. They were always feeding me with theater. ~ Lydia Wilson,

781:this making up stories and conspiracy theories is something we all do. Gottschall writes, “Conspiracy is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.” The problem is that rather than rumbling with vulnerability and staying in uncertainty, we start to fill in the blanks with our fears and worst-case-scenario planning. I love this line from Gottschall: “To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens. ~ Bren Brown,

782:Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle. ~ Michael Chabon,

783:Mamah saw clearly now just what she had lost. She had given up her right to keep her place as the children’s most beloved. The small, daily offices of love that had connected her to the children before—the shoe tying, the hair combing, the nightly storytelling—were no longer hers to claim. How dare she seek from them the comfort that had once so nourished her? To keep them yearning for a mother who was rarely with them, through her own choice, would be to sentence them to whole lifetimes of sorrow. ~ Nancy Horan,

784:The logical next step after determining where a trend is on its trajectory is to follow with an “if this, then that” statement. Step five of our forecasting method is to use Kahn’s technique of storytelling and put the facts into a narrative context to develop possible scenarios for the future. Our goal isn’t to predict something that will definitely happen. Instead, we must envision all of the possible outcomes and use them to help us make an informed decision about strategy to employ in the present. ~ Amy Webb,

785:Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ."...and ..."The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers. ~ Thane Rosenbaum,

786:That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors—coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sue generous explorations. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

787:That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a ixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sui generis explorations ~ Rebecca Solnit,

788:A great story releases a rush of chemicals like cortisol, oxytocin, and dopamine. Thanks to neuroscience we’ve learned more about storytelling in the last 10 years than we’ve known since humans began painting pictures on cave walls. We now know which brain chemicals make us pay attention to a speaker (cortisol) and which make us feel empathy toward another person (oxytocin). We also know what triggers those neurochemicals. We know what stories work, why they work, and we can prove it scientifically. ~ Carmine Gallo,

789:That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sui generis explorations ~ Rebecca Solnit,

790:I must say that those stories for me were always the model for the function of stories and storytelling in our lives, that the idea is that you kind of look reality straight in the face, you know - doesn't matter how ugly it is - and you try to find humanity in it. You try to find beauty in it. You try to find hope in it. So you cannot beautify it, but at the same time, you should find these tiny things that, you know, that would make sometimes a very violent and unhappy occasions still human and emotional. ~ Anonymous,

791:When we make films - even 2D films - you're always trying to create this illusion of 3D, anyway. You're trying to create a believable world with characters walking, in and out of the perspective, to create the illusion that there's a world. The desire and drive to create this illusion of three-dimensional space is something that is true about every kind of film because you want the audience to really be experiencing it, first hand. It's a natural extension of the storytelling and the process of filmmaking. ~ Rob Minkoff,

792:One of the things I miss the most about being a little kid is that when you’re little, all the movies you watch have happy endings. Dorothy goes back to Kansas. Charlie gets the chocolate factory. Edmund redeems himself. I like that. I like happy endings. But, as you get older, you start seeing that sometimes stories don’t have happy endings. Sometimes they even have sad endings. Of course, that makes for more interesting storytelling, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. But it’s also kind of scary. ~ R J Palacio,

793:Dear Abba, If I speak and even the angels swoon, but I have not love…if I have the gift of storytelling and bringing men to tears, but I have not love…if I have the faith to rally mountains of followers for the cause, but I have not love…if I give all my proceeds to charity, but find no trace of charity within myself, then I am nothing more than a noisy nothing, a distraction for those who would seek to find and know You. There is faith, hope, and love, but help me to seek and practice the greatest of these. ~ Brennan Manning,

794:One of the things I miss the most about being a little kid is that when you're little, all the movies you watch have happy endings. Dorothy goes back to Kansas, Charlie gets the chocolate factory. Edmund redeems himself. I like that. I like happy endings. But as you get older, you start seeing that sometimes stories don't have happy endings. Sometimes they even have sad endings, Of course, that makes for more interesting storytelling, because you don't know what's going to happen. Bit it's also kind of scary. ~ R J Palacio,

795:Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them--it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air. ~ Martin Scorsese,

796:Storytelling is the way knowledge and understanding have been passed down for millennia, since long before the invention of written language. Storytelling is part of what it is to be human. And the best stories share our values and beliefs. Those stories are powerful. Those stories inspire. Those stories are both the source of our WHY and the fuel that keeps our WHY alive. That’s the reason companies that understand the importance of living their WHY make it easy for their teams to fortify themselves with stories. ~ Simon Sinek,

797:I love the whole kind of notion of transformation for me is (what) excites me about not only acting, but storytelling. I love, I love that notion of a slightly larger-than-life artistic truth, you know, magnifying real emotional truth (or) finding something about human condition (which), you wouldn't necessarily think you can learn from characters such as Kong or Gollum, but actually they are, you know, these huge amplifications of a human psyche and I suppose those kind of roles have always attracted me definitely. ~ Andy Serkis,

798:I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer,

799:What serialized cable dramas have given us is the opportunity to not simply tell the same story with slightly different words and different costumes, every week. people are really mining the ability of storytellers to tell a long form story that goes from A to Z, and to trust that an audience will follow that. If they miss it, over the course of the week, they can watch it online or buy the DVD. There are so many different ways of interacting with it. Storytelling in television is getting more complex and more nuanced. ~ Sarah Wayne Callies,

800:Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,

801:While the storytelling in games is getting so much better, you look at something like Grand Theft Auto V, which I thought was really beautifully written, it doesn't really need a movie because it is a movie. So I think you need a unique game - you either need an incredibly talented writer and director to come in and put together an amazing vision, or you need a game like Metal Gear, which is very cinematic, has a huge amount of history behind it, but whose cinematic experience is very different from what you'd get in a theater. ~ David Hayter,

802:Resentment is a storytelling passion,' says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book Forgiveness. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

803:Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,

804:The theory I’m putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren’t—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren’t, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn’t just found here and there among human cultures, it’s found universally. ~ Daniel Quinn,

805:The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act. ~ Tobias Wolff,

806:To achieve the intimacy between performer and audience in storytelling, I feel like I have to let the audience in on my emotional state, not just, "Here's a story I'm going to tell by rote, and you're just going to listen to it, because I'm such a wonderfully entertaining fellow." It's the idea of sharing enough of myself that it's not just all about, "Look at me, look at me." There's an element to it of, "You understand what I'm talking about, right? You've been in this place that I've been in," which makes it a richer experience. ~ Paul F Tompkins,

807:Normally my process is to sit in a room and read a script and talk about it and ask questions and just create a dialogue. That goes all the way through shooting. All kinds of thoughts and ideas can find their way in there. As long as you're all on - We're just all trying to tell the story so my job as a director is just to find out what this film wants to be based on, it's just words on a page at some point but then it just needs to go to some level of believable storytelling. I'm discovering the film as I make it, to some degree. ~ Richard Linklater,

808:If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . . What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn’t to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day. Finding the right balance of feedback—encouragement versus vigorous criticism—will help immeasurably. But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward. If it’s any consolation, I’m still working on this final lesson. ~ Steve Almond,

809:Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event. ~ Charlie Kaufman,

810:interview 14 leaders from religions including Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism and Islam in an attempt to figure out the ten characteristics their faiths had in common. In order of importance, I found that they were: A sense of belonging; storytelling; rituals; symbols; a clear vision; sensory appeal; power from enemies; evangelism; mystery; and grandeur. When you think about the world’s most powerful brands—among them Apple, Nike, Harley-Davidson, Coca-Cola, LEGO—you realize they all make use of some if not all of these pillars. ~ Martin Lindstrom,

811:Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. ~ Andy Behrman,

812:If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it's that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records, I don't hear it now the way I did when I was 20. I think it is undeniable that the songs have become more instantaneously descriptive and literal. I'd like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack. I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase. ~ Ben Gibbard,

813:What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. ~ William Maxwell,

814:Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-sa What I said: “Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely hero, Garrett Reilly, reminded me of a young Jack Reacher as a tech-savvy bond analyst. Drew Chapman is a debut novelist to watch. ~ Alafair Burke,

815:What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurring, but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly I look on memory as more than haphazard thinking back - as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention. ~ Peter Handke,

816:My idea of storytelling is - I wouldn't say it's religious but I would say it's spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn't do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, 'Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.' And he said, 'Visions come to prepared spirits.' The way Billy Wilder put it was 'The muse has to know where to find you.' ~ David Milch,

817:The definition of horror is pretty broad. What causes us "horror" is actually a many splendored thing (laughs). It can be hard to make horror accessible, and that's what I think Silence of the Lambs did so brilliantly - it was an accessible horror story, the villain was a monster, and the protagonist was pure of heart and upstanding so it had all of these great iconographic elements of classic storytelling. It was perceived less as a horror movie than an effective thriller, but make no mistake, it was a horror movie and was sort of sneaky that way. ~ Bryan Fuller,

818:Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special “women’s fiction” designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like. Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction. ~ Roxane Gay,

819:People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,

820:The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain. This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it. ~ Will Storr,

821:That’s why it’s crucial for us to learn to suffer well. Those who manage to grow through adversity do so by leaning on the pillars of meaning—and afterward, those pillars are even stronger in their lives. Some go even further. Having witnessed the power of belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence in their own lives, they’re working to bring these wellsprings of meaning into their schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods—and, ultimately, they’re hoping to make a change in our society at large. It is to these cultures of meaning that we now turn. ~ Emily Esfahani Smith,

822:Doesn't matter what anyone else would call it, Len," he says. "This is our story to tell." This is our story to tell. He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way: profoundly. You'd think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven't. I never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever. You can tell your story any way you damn well please. ~ Jandy Nelson,

823:Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools. ~ Daniel Alarcon,

824:This is why I like Diakopoulos’ approach of using technology to answer a need. He identifies four news consumers needs:     1.    staying informed; 2.    gaining personal identity (through, for example, reinforcing one’s values); 3.    integrating and interacting socially (finding the basis for conversation); and 4.    being entertained. He next defines 10 key journalistic functions:     1.    truth 2.    independence 3.    impartiality 4.    public interest 5.    watchdogging 6.    organizing forums 7.    informing 8.    storytelling 9.    aggregating 10.    sensemaking ~ Jeff Jarvis,

825:Nowadays I’m really cranky about comics. Because most of them are just really, really poorly written soft-core. And I miss good old storytelling. And you know what else I miss? Super powers. Why is it now that everybody’s like “I can reverse the polarity of your ions!” Like in one big flash everybody’s Doctor Strange. I like the guys that can stick to walls and change into sand and stuff. I don’t understand anything anymore. And all the girls are wearing nothing, and they all look like they have implants. Well, I sound like a very old man, and a cranky one, but it’s true. ~ Joss Whedon,

826:Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you. ~ Alice Walker,

827:Writing a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what. ~ Andrew Bujalski,

828:When it comes to the selections, I heard several observers claim that the Academy was embracing “nostalgia” by honoring The Artist and Hugo. Give me a break! Hugo represents cutting-edge storytelling by a world-class director—in 3-D, no less. The Artist dares to revisit a form of cinema that was abandoned in the late 1920s. The Academy members admired these films for making the past seem immediate and relevant. That has nothing to do with nostalgia; it has everything to do with great moviemaking, which is what the Academy Awards are all about. ~ Leonard Maltin,

829:I believe that the greatest music is storytelling anyway, in a heightened medium. So I write a lot of music, and I play a lot with my guitar, I still sing a lot, but now I'm more personal about it than public, in a way. I think there will be a time where I'd like to bring the singing back into some of my performances. It all depends if the material's right, if the story's right, if it's my kind of taste in music, as well. It means so much to me. We all know how affective music can be, I just want to make sure when I do it, I'm doing it because I actually feel it and I care about it. ~ Aneurin Barnard,

830:storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become your worth. But a story like this is never honest or helpful. In my retelling to you just now, I left a lot out. Conveniently omitted were the stresses and temptations; the stomach-turning drops and the mistakes—all the mistakes—were left on the cutting-room floor in favor of the highlight reel. They are the times I would rather not discuss: A public evisceration by someone I looked up to, which so crushed me at the time that I was later taken to the emergency room. The day I lost my nerve, ~ Ryan Holiday,

831:People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came into play really in the '60s. That moment of performance is a tremendous opportunity to make visible something hitherto invisible, which is how people want to be seen. How do they see themselves? What are the scripts, fantasies, genres by which they imagine themselves? How is storytelling part of what we are as human beings? We wouldn't kill each other en masse if it weren't for storytelling. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer,

832:Machines have given us a new ability to count and make our understanding quantitative. The Web connects news gatherers with audiences in ways that were never possible before and can bring a breadth of intelligence, and experiences to understanding the news we never had. And professional reporters and editors still have a unique role to play in triangulating those inputs as well as bringing three other distinct skills - access to interrogate people in power, exceptional storytelling skills, and a discipline of open minded, skeptical inquiry - which are not as likely to be found elsewhere. ~ Tom Rosenstiel,

833:Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life. ~ Graham Swift,

834:What keeps faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humor. Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music, and books, raising kids-all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake. ~ Garrison Keillor,

835:That is why I need you to take into account the elasticity of time, its ability to expand or contract like an accordion regardless of clocks. I am sure this is something you will have experienced frequently in your own lives, depending on which side of the bathroom door you found yourselves. In Andrew's case, time expanded in his mind, creating an eternity out of a few seconds. I am going to describe the scene from that perspective, and therefore ask you not to blame my inept storytelling for the discrepancies you will no doubt perceive between the events and their correlation in time." pg. 61 ~ F lix J Palma,

836:In my long career in this historical fiction business, though, I've found that the most effective storytelling concept is this: Once upon a time it was now. That has become my credo and my method as a longtime historical novelist. It's quite simple, if you see as Janus sees: Today is now. Yesterday was now. Tomorrow will be now. Three hundred years ago, the eighteenth century was now. You, as a historical novelist, can make any time now by taking your reader into that time. Once you grasp that, the rest is just hard work. Stay with me, and you'll see how such work is done. ~ James Alexander Thom,

837:more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s story. ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

838:After a childhood reading fairy tales and myths, is it any wonder that when I began to write my own stories I included fairy tales? Fairy tales are storytelling at its most basic. They’ve been with mankind for as long as people have told stories to each other. Fairy tales speak to something intrinsic in humans—they touch our most primitive selves. How else to explain that the Cinderella story is told in nearly every society on earth? To think of fairy tales as merely stories for children is to ignore thousands of years when fairy tales were used to teach morality, to warn, and to entertain both children and adults. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,

839:Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales... Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

840:Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

841:The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped. 'I had always,' wrote G.K. Chesterton in accounting for his Christian belief, 'felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a story-teller.' We enter this story, following the story-making, storytelling Jesus, and spend the rest of our lives exploring the amazing and exquisite details, the words and sentences that go into the making of the story of our creation, salvation, and life of blessing. It is a story chock full of invisibles and intricate with connections. Imagination is required. ~ Eugene H Peterson,

842:Good poetry doesn’t try to define an experience as much as it tries to give you the experience itself, just as good liturgy should do. It tries to awaken your own seeing, hearing and knowing. It does not give you the conclusion as much as teach you a process whereby you can know for yourself. It does not “overexplain and destroy astonishment.” Jesus does the same, particularly with the parables, and even says so at both the beginning and end of his parabolic discourse (see Matthew 13:13, 51–52). That’s why the long standing language of religion was poetry, aphorism and sacred storytelling, never merely prose or linear doctrines. ~ Richard Rohr,

843:mesmerizing Southern drama about a young woman who returns to her coastal home to put to rest the haunting ghost of her sister’s tragic past. Told in the rich, lyrical style of Siddons and Conroy, The Girl Who Stayed is a woman’s story of discovery and acceptance, redefined by Tanya Anne Crosby’s dramatic storytelling, sharp characters, and well-defined plot. A must read for any woman who believes she can never go back home. Fabulous, rich and evocative!” – New York Times bestselling author Jill Barnett “Crosby tugs heartstrings in a spellbinding story of a woman trying to move beyond her past.” – New York Times bestselling ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

844:The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible. ~ George Saunders,

845:Many of you know little about storytelling. Before I begin, let me explain. The Story is the story of us all. If understood properly, it is of immense power. It tells you who you are, what you might expect from this life. Some believe it can foretell the future. Mastery of the Story gives you mastery over life itself. It contains precious, holy relics of the age of giants which preceded us. It tells of our rise, our glories and our occasional disgraces. It tells of our fathers and grandfathers, of the animals and the trees and the spirits, containing all the knowledge you need to please them so they will help rather than punish you. ~ Iain Pears,

846:Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world. ~ Daniel J Siegel,

847:Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty. ~ Walter Moers,

848:Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you." ~ Alice WalkerAlice Walker, in an interview about her work in Common Boundary, 1990 ~ Alice Walker,

849:The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature Tanya Anne Crosby read, filled with flawed characters, and brimming with emotion. Set in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, this book takes me home and is both deeply personal and intensely satisfying, in terms of pushing the storytelling envelope. In a sense, I’ve opened a vein with Zoe’s ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

850:So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes. *** The flaw in the Christ ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

851:This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. ~ Walter Benjamin,

852:for me, although with the same voice my readers have come to anticipate. I believe that people are pretty much the same, regardless of era, physical space, or culture, and this is the essence of my storytelling. I strive for characters you will relate to, no matter where or when they may have lived. The Girl Who Stayed is also a book of the heart and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see its publication. In my twenty-six years of publishing, it’s my first major hardcover release and brings me full circle to work with Lou Aronica, whom I first had the pleasure of working with while at Avon Books. It’s also my very first non-genre novel, although you will find it a signature ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

853:But the more I looked at the card, the more it troubled me. My poems didn’t tell stories. I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories. As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it. This has always struck me as cause for lament, not celebration. As soon as a writer starts talking about the “human need for narrative” or the “archaic power of storytelling,” I usually find myself wanting to bolt out of the auditorium. Otherwise my blood creeps up to my face and begins to boil ~ Maggie Nelson,

854:There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special “women’s fiction” designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like. Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction. Anyone who reads knows this isn’t the case, but that misperception lingers. ~ Roxane Gay,

855:Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. ~ Walter Benjamin,

856:The parable of the spider was not invented by Scott. There is a much older storytelling tradition, spanning many cultures, about their industry and perseverance. Spiders and caves come up again and again, often in tales to comfort children. One old fable has the holy family fleeing Herod’s men soon after Christ’s birth. They take shelter in a cave and a spider, understanding the importance of the child, spins a web across the cave mouth to make it look as if no one has entered in a long time. Overnight the strands are covered by glittering frost and by the time the soldiers arrive, the illusion is complete. Tinsel is hung on Christmas trees in memory of the crucial role played by another spider and another web. ~ Neil Oliver,

857:Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

858:Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin,

859:In terms of identity? I’m a commercial fantasy writer, looking to entertain my audience with fantastical tales that mix history with myth and magic. That’s something humans have been doing for a very long time, and I like being part of a long tradition of storytelling, whether that’s ancient tales shared around a campfire or modern podcasts. ... I’m currently editing a scene that involves winged lions and smoke-conjured armor, so I’m not certain I’m the best writer to ask about truth. But that being said, words and stories have great power and I think setting a scene that pulls from the real world but is set in a fictional one can cause readers to reassess and question things in a way they might not have otherwise.  ~ S A Chakraborty,

860:MATTHEW, MARK, AND LUKE tell the story of Jesus in ways similar to one another (which is why they’re often called the synoptic gospels—with a similar optic, or viewpoint). Many details differ (and the differences are quite fascinating), but it’s clear the three compositions share common sources. The Fourth Gospel tells the story quite differently. These differences might disturb people who don’t understand that storytelling in the ancient world was driven less by a duty to convey true details accurately and more by a desire to proclaim true meaning powerfully. The ancient editors who put the New Testament together let the differences stand as they were, so each story can convey its intended meanings in its own unique ways. ~ Brian D McLaren,

861:The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself. ~ Ted Chiang,

862:Since the beginning of storytelling, he explained, Death has called on the unwitting. In one tale or another, it arrives quietly in town and takes a room at an inn, or lurks in an alleyway, or lingers in the marketplace, surreptitiously. Then just when the hero has a moment of respite from his daily affairs, Death pays him a visit. This is all well and good, allowed the Count. But what is rarely related is the fact that Life is every bit as devious as Death. It too can wear a hooded coat. It too can slip into town, lurk in an alley, or wait in the back of a tavern. Hadn't it paid such a visit to Mishka? Hadn't it found him hiding behind his books, lured him out of the library, and taken his hand on a secluded spot overlooking the Neva? ~ Amor Towles,

863:. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. 'After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,"' psychologist Joshua Aronson says. 'But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say "I don't know" more often. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

864:The world of storytelling was changing dramatically around Enoch. The new visual communication called “cuneiform” was overtaking the traditional oral recitation of verse. Scribes created cuneiform as a codified physical expression of language, using utensils to make impressions on clay tablets. The scribes wanted to keep a tangible account of personal and public wealth that could not be challenged by verbal lies or faulty memory. Using handheld styluses pressed into the clay, they could list objects owned by the ruler and how many he possessed. It had started out as pictographs of cows, gold, wheat, wood, and other belongings. It had evolved into an abstract system of symbols that could be rapidly copied or communicated in a legal dispute. ~ Brian Godawa,

865:You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or twenty would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the school (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the difference between top ten and top two thousand schools). The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on the repository site arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low-quality fields like academic finance (where papers are usually some form of complicated storytelling), the “prestige” of the journal is the sole criterion. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

866:Film and television have convinced too many writers that heaps of dialogue make novels more like movies and therefore good. This is an amateur's fantasy, and it has induced some writers to surrender the few advantages they have over cinematic storytelling. The moviemaker is stuck with what the camera can see and the microphone can hear. You have more freedom. You can summarize situations. You can forthrightly give us people's histories. You can concentrate ten years into ten words. You can move anywhere you like outside real time. You can tell us—just tell us—what people are thinking and feeling. Yes, abundant dialogue can lighten a story, make it more readable and sparkle with wonders. But it is pitiably inadequate before what it is not suited to do. ~ Stephen Koch,

867:Have you noticed,' she asked, straightening the counting frames to her liking before closing the cupboard doors and turning toward him, 'that at church when the clergyman is giving his sermon everyone's eyes glaze over and many people even nod off to sleep? But if he suddenly decides to illustrate a point with a little story, everyone perks up and listens. WE were made to tell and listen to stories, Joel, It is how knowledge was passed from person to person and generation to generation before there was the written word, and even afterward, when most people had no access to manuscripts or books and could not read them even if they did. Why do we now feel that storytelling should be confined to fiction and fantasy? Can we enjoy only what has no basis in fact? ~ Mary Balogh,

868:Despite the proliferation of personal storytelling in recent years, and the shift in social conditions that has facilitated these stories being told and heard, there are still certain stories that cannot be told—either because we have no language with which to articulate them or because there is no interpretive community to hear and understand them. These stories become, instead, secrets and lies—stories that signal social isolation and disempowerment rather than connection and strength. One such story within contemporary culture, as the epigraphs from Dorothy Allison and Victoria Brownworth suggest, is the story of class—a story that often only becomes tellable as a lie, joke, or dirty secret. This is especially the case with the category of “white trash. ~ Annalee Newitz,

869:be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story," means no less than, Be loyal to life, don't create fiction but accept what life is giving you, show yourself worthy of whatever it may be by recollecting and pondering over it, thus repeating it in imagination; this is the way to remain alive. And to live in the sense of being fully alive had early been and remained to the end her only aim and desire. "My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go." The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go: "When the storyteller is loyal ... to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. ~ Isak Dinesen,

870:After days of feasting, fast. After days of sleeping, stay awake one night. After these times of bitter storytelling, joking, and serious considerations, we should give ourselves two days between layers of baklava in the quiet seclusion where soul sweetens and thrives more than with language. I hear nothing in my ear but your voice. Heart has plundered mind of its eloquence. Love writes a transparent calligraphy, so on the empty page my soul can read and recollect. Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands, or your own genuine solitude? Freedom, or power over an entire nation? A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you. Rumi, Two days of silence ~ Rumi,

871:Over time, we asked writers like the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault to publish the stories so they would live on forever. During that time, I realized how important storytelling is. While philosophy and science help enhance our mind and body, storytelling stimulates our spirit. It broadens our imagination, teaches us valuable lessons, shows us that things are not always as they seem, and encourages us to reach our greatest potential. With that said, I have a favor to ask of anyone reading this: Become a storyteller! Read to others the fairy tales in this book. Read them stories from another book. If you can, create your own stories to share. When you pass along the art of storytelling to your family and friends, you make the world a better place. ~ Chris Colfer,

872:We writers want readers to love our books. Greedy people that we are, we mean all readers. But in our more rational moments, we know that there is no book written that every reader enjoys. This is because people read for different reasons. Some readers want fast-paced excitement—and will put down a slower-paced book that examines the same reality as their own lives. Others want thoughtful insights into reality—and will put down fantasies of nonstop adventure. Some want to read about people they can identify with, some about characters they will never meet. Some seek clear, straightforward storytelling, and some cherish style: the unexpected phrase in exactly the right place. Some want affirmations of values they already hold, and some hope to be challenged, even disturbed. It’s ~ Nancy Kress,

873:According to Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, a company’s purpose should answer the question, “Why do we exist?” Kelly adds, “We exist to connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.”6 Only storytelling can rally passionate people around a common purpose. Each week Kelly gives a “shout out”—public praise—to employees who have gone above and beyond to show great customer service. Each month the Southwest Spirit magazine features the story of an employee who has gone above and beyond. Southwest highlights positive behaviors through a variety of recognition programs and awards. Finally, internal corporate videos are filled with real examples and stories to help employees visualize what each step of the purpose looks and feels like. ~ Carmine Gallo,

874:I think US/UK genre has become more open to “diverse” writers and writing; there’s a genuine interest in reading work from countries outside the US/UK and hearing voices that have been historically shut out, but at the same time, people are quite lazy. That sounds harsh, but I include myself in it — your tastes are shaped by what you’ve read and watched before, and it takes a little effort to understand stories that use a different voice, that follow different storytelling conventions, that are trying to subvert the dominant paradigm. There’s a quite large group of people who are “yay diversity” in theory, but I think the number of people who have then said to themselves, “OK, if I’m committed to this, I need to start reading outside my comfort zone and making an effort” is maybe a little smaller. ~ Zen Cho,

875:Because we human beings are verbal and communal animals, we cannot remain wonder-struck and dumb. We need to say something. We are a species given to storytelling and philosophizing to explain our world. Ergo, it is pure folly to suppose we can avoid speaking about the ultimate context and meaning of our existence. We cannot simply be content with the private experience of elementary emotions and the great encompassing mystery. Our feelings demand expression. How are we to understand this perennial need to speak to G-d and about G-d even when what we say involves contradictions, paradoxes, and sacred nonsense? To communicate is to come back into the community. The hero must return from the inner journey to the common life of dialogue and engagement. PRAYERS TO AN ABSENT G-D ON PRAYER You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. ~ Sam Keen,

876:As a species, humans straddle a line between external and internal intelligence. With big brains and (typically) small clan size, humans have traditionally harnessed individual cleverness to outcompete rivals for food and mates, to hunt and dominate other species, and, eventually, to seize control of the planet. As later chapters will show, we have also externalized our wisdom in the form of trails, oral storytelling, written texts, art, maps, and much more recently, electronic data. Nevertheless, even in the Internet era, we still romanticize the lone genius. Most of us—especially us Americans—like to consider any brilliance we may possess, and the accomplishments that have sprung from it, as being solely our own. In our egotism, we have long remained blind to the communal infrastructure that undergirds our own eureka moments. ~ Robert Moor,

877:Waiting periods, counseling, ultrasounds, transvaginal ultrasounds, sonogram storytelling—all of these legislative moves are invasive, insulting, and condescending because they are deeply misguided attempts to pressure women into changing their minds, to pressure women into not terminating their pregnancies, as if women are so easily swayed that such petty and cruel stall tactics will work. These politicians do not understand that once a woman has made up her mind about terminating a pregnancy, very little will sway her. It is not a decision taken lightly, and if a woman does take the decision lightly, that is her right. A woman should always have the right to choose what she does with her body. It is frustrating that this needs to be said, repeatedly. On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a woman's choices should not merit measure. ~ Roxane Gay,

878:I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” “I have a dream that one day…” “I have a dream that one day…” “I have a dream today.” In the Dream Speech King puts on a master class in the use of anaphora. Anaphora is a storytelling device where a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses and sentences. In politics Democratic and Republican leaders share one big love—anaphora. In January 2015 Democratic president Barack Obama asked the nation: “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?” 6 “Will we approach the world…?” “Will we allow ourselves to be…? ~ Carmine Gallo,

879:Does the sacred quest end with cultivating our own gardens and dwelling within our private and incommunicable experiences? Because we human beings are verbal and communal animals, we cannot remain wonder-struck and dumb. We need to say something. We are a species given to storytelling and philosophizing to explain our world. Ergo, it is pure folly to suppose we can avoid speaking about the ultimate context and meaning of our existence. We cannot simply be content with the private experience of elementary emotions and the great encompassing mystery. Our feelings demand expression. How are we to understand this perennial need to speak to G-d and about G-d even when what we say involves contradictions, paradoxes, and sacred nonsense? To communicate is to come back into the community. The hero must return from the inner journey to the common life of dialogue and engagement. ~ Sam Keen,

880:A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray. Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present. ~ Alain de Botton,

881:To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no "real" genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were hsi father's, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away. ~ Salman Rushdie,

882:To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no “real” genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father’s, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away. ~ Salman Rushdie,

883:THE TASTE A walnut kernel shaken against its shell makes a delicate sound, but the walnut taste and the sweet oil inside makes unstruck music. Mystics call the shell rattling talk, the other, the taste of silence. We've been speaking poetry and opening so-called secrets of soul growth long enough. After days of feasting, fast; after days of sleeping, stay awake one night; after these times of bitter storytelling, joking, and serious considerations, we should give ourselves two days between layers of baklava in the quiet seclusion where soul sweetens and thrives more than with language. ----------------------------------------- I hear nothing in my ear but your voice. Heart has plundered mind of all its eloquence. Love writes a transparent calligraphy, so on the empty page my soul can read and recollect. ~ Rumi,

884:I knew that, on camera, when you walk into a room in your own home, you must know where the light switch is. You can’t need to look. Or else it’s a lie, which is like giving the audience a pinch of poison. When you tell a story, you have to take liberties. You compress time. You create composite characters. You jump years ahead or flash back. Art is not life. But if your character has a longtime girlfriend and you’re tentative or formal with her, touching her as if she’s someone you just met? Another pinch. The audience might not be consciously aware of these little pinches, but if you keep doling them out, they’re reaching for the remote, or they’re walking out of the theater. They’re sick of the poison. They don’t want any more. They’re done. They might not even realize they’re responding to inauthenticity or sloppiness in storytelling. It’s not the audience’s job to articulate the reasons. It’s their job to feel. ~ Bryan Cranston,

885:First there was OralTrad, upgraded ten thousand years later by the rhyming (for easier recall) Oral TradPlus. For thousands of years this was the only Story Operating System and it is still in use today. The system branched in two about twenty thousand years ago; on one side with CaveDaubPro (forerunner of PaintPlus V2.3, GrecianUrn V1.2, Sculpt-Marble V1.4 and the latest, all-encompassing SuperArtisticExpression-5). The other strand, the Picto-Phonetic Storytelling Systems, started with Clay Tablet V2.1 and went through several competing systems (Wax-Tablet, Papyrus, VellumPlus) before merging into the award-winning SCROLL, which was upgraded eight times to V3.5 before being swept aside by the all new and clearly superior BOOK V1. Stable, easy to store and transport, compact and with a workable index, BOOK has led the way for nearly eighteen hundred years. WORDMASTER XAVIER LIBRIS, Story Operating Systems—the Early Years ~ Jasper Fforde,

886:Peshat is the plain sense reading. It looks to the surface meaning of the text, drawing on knowledge of word meanings, grammar, syntax, context, cognate Semitic languages, archaeology, and history. Remez is the allegorical, or symbolic, reading. It looks for parallels between the scriptural text and more abstract concepts. This kind of reading sees biblical characters, events, and literary compositions as standing for other truths. Derash is the inquiring or interpretive reading. It looks for further layers of meaning. Midrash, the Jewish tradition of interpreting the scripture through creative storytelling, derives from this way of reading. Sod is the mystical reading. It looks at the biblical text as a symbolic code, which with piety and effort will yield hidden wisdom and personal connection with the Divine. The Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah relies on complex symbolic interpretation of each individual letter of the biblical text. ~ Anonymous,

887:The ten instincts and cognitive psychology. Our thinking on the ten instincts was influenced by the work of a number of brilliant cognitive scientists. Some of the books that completely changed our thinking about the mind and about how we should teach facts about the world are: Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (2008), The Upside of Irrationality (2010), and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (2012); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997), The Stuff of Thought (2007), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011); Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (2007); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011); Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test (2014); Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting (2015); Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal (2012); Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and The Righteous Mind (2012); and Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So (1991). ~ Hans Rosling,

888:Below is Pixar’s storytelling process overlayed on Malala’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: Once there was a little girl who lived in a “paradise home” in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, “a place of tourism and beauty.” 4 Every day she had “a thirst for education” and would go to class “to sit and learn and read.” Until one day the Swat Valley “turned into a place of terrorism.” Because of that girls’ education became a crime and “girls were stopped from going to school.” Because of that Malala’s priorities changed: “I decided to speak up.” Until finally the terrorists attacked Malala. She survived. “Neither their ideas nor their bullets could win.” Ever since then Malala’s voice “has grown louder and louder” because Malala is speaking for the 66 million girls deprived of an education. “I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not,” Malala said. “It is the story of many girls … I am those 66 million girls who are deprived of education. ~ Carmine Gallo,

889:Here’s another analogy. Human beings bring only a handful of facial features to the blueprint of how we look—two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, a mouth, a pair of cheekbones, and two ears, all pasted onto a somewhat ovular-to-round face. That particular blueprint doesn’t often vary much, either. Interestingly enough, this is about the same number of essential storytelling parts and milestones that each and every story needs to showcase in order to be successful. Now, consider this: With only these eleven variables to work with, ask yourself how often you see two people who look exactly alike. In a crowd of ten thousand faces, you would be able to differentiate each and every one of them, other than a set of twins or two in attendance. Where we humans are concerned, the miracle of originality resides in the Creator, who applies an engineering-driven process—eleven variables— to an artistic outcome. Where art is concerned, there is something to be learned from that. ~ Larry Brooks,

890:Stella Cameron, New York Times bestselling author “The Girl Who Stayed defies type. Crosby’s tale is honest and sen- sitive, eerie and tragic. It’s a homecoming tale of a past ever with us and irrevocably lost forever. A haunting vision of that chasm between life and death we call ‘missing.’” – Pamela Morsi, bestselling author of Simple Jess “An intense, mesmerizing Southern drama about a young woman who returns to her coastal home to put to rest the haunting ghost of her sister’s tragic past. Told in the rich, lyrical style of Siddons and Conroy, The Girl Who Stayed is a woman’s story of discovery and acceptance, redefined by Tanya Anne Crosby’s dramatic storytelling, sharp characters, and well-defined plot. A must read for any woman who believes she can never go back home. Fabulous, rich and evocative!” – New York Times bestselling author Jill Barnett “Crosby tugs heartstrings in a spellbinding story of a woman trying to move beyond her past.” – New York Times bestselling ~ Tanya Anne Crosby,

891:It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space...[who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: "Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!" And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

892:Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men. Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake. ~ Bill Willingham,

893:You can tell the story without ever going to Mount Mitchell, it’s still an entertaining story. But when you go up on top of that mountain and you see that landform, you’re like ‘Oh, this is what they’re describing.’ It’s amazing.” “Almost every prominent rock and mountain, every deep bend in the river, in the old Cherokee country has its accompanying legend,” noted the ethnographer James Mooney. “It may be a little story that can be told in a paragraph, to account for some natural feature, or it may be one chapter of a myth that has its sequel in a mountain a hundred miles away.” This phenomenon, Mooney wrote, extended well beyond the Cherokee. In the storytelling traditions of virtually every indigenous culture, stories don’t unfold abstractly, like Little Red Riding Hood skipping through unnamed woods; they take place. The stories of the Inuit, for example, always specify a real setting where the story (often, a depiction of a journey) unfolds; many stories even include details about the direction of the prevailing wind. ~ Robert Moor,

894:It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.41 The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences. But we do not need the form of the artist to witness this transfiguration. Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before. ~ Hannah Arendt,

895:Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Denmark), George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde (19th-century England). The Brothers Grimm (19th-century Germany) blurred the line between oral and literary tales by presenting their German "household tales" as though they came straight from the mouths of peasants, though in fact they revised these stories to better reflect their own Protestant ethics. It is interesting to note that these canonized writers are all men, since this is a reversal from the oral storytelling tradition, historically dominated by women. Indeed, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and even the Brothers Grimm made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose. ~ Terri Windling,

896:There's this thing that writers talk about--where the characters take on a life of their own and they run away with the story, taking it off to places the author never intended to go. That's what happened here. Except, that's not what really happens. That's one of the stories that writers tell about storytelling. What really happened was that I sat and wrote and had a conversation with myself--a conversation that wasn't possible, unless I let part of myself pretend it was someone else--a disembodied voice in the typewriter. And so I typed. I typed everything I felt and feared and worried about, everything I thought I knew, and everything else as well, the much larger domain of what I didn't know and didn't know how to figure out. Because this, at last, was a place where I could talk to somebody about it all--and if that somebody was really me, that was okay too, because I was the guy who had to figure it out anyway. So I had all these conversations with myself--and these different parts of me talked into the keyboard. And talked and talked and talked. ~ David Gerrold,

897:Children have an elemental hunger for knowledge and understanding, for mental food and stimulation. They do not need to be told or “motivated” to explore or play, for play, like all creative or proto-creative activities, is deeply pleasurable in itself. Both the innovative and the imitative impulses come together in pretend play, often using toys or dolls or miniature replicas of real-world objects to act out new scenarios or rehearse and replay old ones. Children are drawn to narrative, not only soliciting and enjoying stories from others, but creating them themselves. Storytelling and mythmaking are primary human activities, a fundamental way of making sense of our world. Intelligence, imagination, talent, and creativity will get nowhere without a basis of knowledge and skills, and for this education must be sufficiently structured and focused. But an education too rigid, too formulaic, too lacking in narrative, may kill the once-active, inquisitive mind of a child. Education has to achieve a balance between structure and freedom, and each child’s needs may be extremely variable. ~ Oliver Sacks,

898:Where I come from, nobody reads novels unless they're like my mother-- fetishizing the artistic media of a bygone era, probably because it was the last time she was happy. But regular people don't read books there. That quasi- telepathic pact between author and reader held little interest for a general audience. Because the dominant storytelling medium of my world involved the seamless integration of an individual's subconscious wiring into the narrative, evoking deep personal wonder and terror, familiarity and delight, yearning and fury, and a triggering catharsis so spellbinding and essential that the idea of sitting down to page through a novel that's not even intended to be about the secret box inside your mind-- why would anyone want to do that for, like, fun? Unless, of course, you were constitutionally inclined to sublimate yourself to a stronger personality, in which case reading a book where every word is fixed in place by the deliberate choices of a controlling vision, surrendering agency over your own imagination to a stranger you'll likely never meet, is some sort of masochistic pleasure. ~ Elan Mastai,

899:The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both. ~ Walter Isaacson,

900:millennials are a median age of twenty-seven. There’s seventy-five to eighty million of us. We are now the biggest group of employees in the workforce. There’s more of us than boomers or gen X. We’re also approaching peak spending years. And so as a foundational part of the economy, millennials are by far the most important group for the next forty years. And so, as a business, that’s the group you want to build your audience around. When you look at Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, all of those—all of those great news companies have a median viewer above sixty years old. That’s median. That means half of them are even older than that. “We plan on growing up with our audience,” Alcheck continued. “The biggest innovation is actually improving the storytelling, improving the journalism. Our audience is maturing, is approaching a new life stage where it’s about getting married and having kids and thinking about the world differently than they’ve been thinking about it for the last decade. And so for us, a big part of what we’re doing is continuing—is a relentless focus on making our journalism better. And I think that’s what’s going to ultimately either keep people or people will leave. ~ Bob Schieffer,

901:Once, several years ago, I was looking around for something and moved a piece of furniture only to behold behind it a fuzzy little ball of...what? I looked closer, which is always a bad idea, adn jumped back with a screech. Of course, it was a dead mouse. A dead mouse that had been there long enough that it looked a little--what?--petrified. So I did what any normal person would do in a similar circumstance. I immediately, that very minute, sat down and wrote a story about it. I wrote and wrote until I was pleased with the dead mouse story. And then I used a piece of cardboard to life and slide the little mouse corpse into a small white box--the kind you use for jewelry. After all, I reasoned, I had just written a story about him! It felt like something worse than abandonment to get rid of him now...we were linked! Connected through the sacred ritual of storytelling. And anyway, what if this story ended up, you know, famous? What if my dead mouse story ended up being my "The Lottery"? Wouldn't it be incredibly neat to still have the original thing that inspired it? Yes, this is the way I think. So you can see the situation is bad. I have at least one dead rodent that I have kept ON PURPOSE. ~ Eve O Schaub,

902:Pandora launched into a detailed account of her conversation with the hermit crab, reporting that his name was Shelley, after the poet, whose works he admired. He was a well-traveled crustacean, having flown to distant lands while clinging to the pink leg of a herring gull who had no taste for shellfish, preferring hazelnuts and bread crumbs. One day, the herring gull, who possessed the transmigrated soul of an Elizabethan stage actor, had taken Shelley to see Hamlet at the Drury Lane theater. During the performance, they had alighted on the scenery and played the part of a castle gargoyle for the entire second act. Shelley had enjoyed the experience but had no wish to pursue a theatrical career, as the hot stage lights had nearly fricasseed him. Gabriel stopped digging and listened, transported by the wonder and whimsy of Pandora's imagination. Out of thin air, she created a fantasy world in which animals could talk and anything was possible. He was charmed out of all reason as he watched her, this sandy, disheveled, storytelling mermaid, who seemed already to belong to him and yet wanted nothing to do with him. His heart worked in strange rhythms, as if it were struggling to adjust to a brand new metronome. What was happening to him? ~ Lisa Kleypas,

903:Although Breaking Bad owes a great deal of its success to its talented cast and crew, fundamentally the program utilized a simple formula to keep people tuning in. At the heart of every episode — and also across each season’s narrative arc — is a problem the characters must resolve. For example, during an episode in the first season, Walter White must find a way to dispose of the bodies of two rival drug dealers. Challenges prevent resolution of the conflict and suspense is created as the audience waits to find out how the storyline ends. In this particular episode, White discovers one of the drug dealers is still alive and is faced with the dilemma of having to kill someone he thought was already dead. Invariably, each episode’s central conflict is resolved near the end of the show, at which time a new challenge arises to pique the viewer’s curiosity. By design, the only way to know how Walter gets out of the mess he is in at the end of the latest episode is to watch the next episode.     The cycle of conflict, mystery and resolution is as old as storytelling itself, and at the heart of every good tale is variability. The unknown is fascinating and strong stories hold our attention by waiting to reveal what happens next. In a phenomenon called “experience-taking, ~ Nir Eyal,

904:There are a number of good books that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano);  Larissa Lai's unusual novel, When Fox Is a Thousand; Helen Oyeyemi's recent novel, Mr. Fox; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous urban fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife" (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody.  You can also support a fine mythic writer by subscribing to Sylvia Linsteadt's The Gray Fox Epistles: Wild Tales By Mail.  For the fox in myth, legend, and lore, try: Fox by Martin Wallen; Reynard the Fox, edited by Kenneth Varty; Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humour by Kiyoshi Nozaki;Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Raina Huntington; The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling by Leo Tak-hung Chan; and The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, by Karen Smythers. ~ Terri Windling,

905:When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah—scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The confusion between these two diverse human activities—inventing stories and following traces in order to find something—is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night’s storytelling. The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat. ~ Carlo Rovelli,

906:they catch us, we’re going right back into the cell.” Roark went silent, and then dragged a chair out from the table. “Sit,” he ordered gently, moving away from it and taking the one on the opposite side. I sat down after a fraction of a second, and then looked at him expectantly. “It’s good that you’re thinking of us as a ‘we,’” he said, “because at this point we are, and we’re all in it together.” “Yes, but to what end? What purpose? What is your ultimate goal here?” I knew I came off as a bit angry, but the truth was I was frustrated. My patience was almost gone, and I was scared and tired—a dangerous combination that always led to emotional outbursts. For his part, Roark didn’t seem to mind my anger. In fact, his face looked almost vacant, lost in thought, and a bit sad. I leaned forward, concerned, but then his eyes flicked over to me and he began to speak. “Her name was Selka,” he said, and then paused. I bit back a sigh and leaned back. Why did everyone want to do this kind of storytelling with me, during which I had to participate and ask questions to coax the story forward? Why couldn’t anyone just be direct? “She was my wife,” he continued, just as I was about to ask the question, and I quickly closed my mouth, my frustration fading somewhat as I remembered Grey’s words. “She wasn’t ~ Bella Forrest,

907:Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper rapport with the beings around us, or of calling the living land into resonance with us. It is a power we still brush up against whenever we use our words to bless and to curse, or to charm someone we're drawn to. But we wield such eloquence only to sway other people, and so we miss the greater magnetism, the gravitational power that lies within such speech. The beaver gliding across the pond, the fungus gripping a thick trunk, a boulder shattered by its tumble down a cliff or the rain splashing upon those granite fragments -- we talk about such beings, the weather and the weathered stones, but we do not talk to them. Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. We've lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us. ~ David Abram,

908:all of Jane’s heroines will marry for love and nothing else. Of course their suitors come with material advantages, and no one chooses foolishly, but what it really comes down to, for Catherine Morland, Elinor Dashwood, Lizzy Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, is finding the right man. Or … so you think at first. Jane’s novels are celebrated for the new meanings you pick up each time you reread them. And when Jane approaches the moment when her heroines must marry, it is possible to argue that something a little strange happens to her storytelling. Yes, this is a highly contentious suggestion, but bear with me. If you look at the exact moments where love is brought to a climax, and matches are made, you may find them a little abrupt, almost perfunctory. We don’t hear Emma Woodhouse accepting Mr Knightley’s proposal, we don’t see Edmund falling in love with Fanny Price. And in the very final paragraph of Mansfield Park, the object of Fanny’s affections, like Charlotte Lucas’s, is defined as a house. It was Mansfield Parsonage that she now finds ‘as dear to her heart’ as anything.24 Perhaps Jane treated these events lightly, almost mechanically, because she didn’t really believe that a man, on his own, could bring a happy ending. So, if there is even a smidgeon of possibility that Jane herself might choose to marry a house, ~ Lucy Worsley,

909:I’m particularly struck by Byron’s focus on speed—on “zipping through” complex problems of logic and storytelling—because it reminds me of what Andrew Stanton says about being a director. I’ve told you about Andrew’s belief that we will all be happier and more productive if we hurry up and fail. For him, moving quickly is a plus because it prevents him from getting stuck worrying about whether his chosen course of action is the wrong one. Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided. Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him to make land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way.” Maybe land actually is that way and maybe it isn’t, but Andrew says that if you don’t have somebody choosing a course—pointing their finger toward that spot there, on the horizon—then the ship goes nowhere. It’s not a tragedy if the leader changes her mind later and says, “Okay, it’s actually not that way, it’s this way. I was wrong.” As long as you commit to a destination and drive toward it with all your might, people will accept when you correct course. “People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up,” as Andrew says. “It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions. ~ Ed Catmull,

910:Atonement theology is not the pathway to life. The ability to give ourselves away to others in love is. It is not the winners who achieve life’s meaning; it is the givers. That is the basis upon which a new Christianity can be built for a new world. Atonement theology was born in Gentile ignorance of Jewish worship traditions. It was fed over the centuries by literalizing biblical narratives in ways that Jewish worshippers, who knew about storytelling, would never have understood. I say it again: Biblical literalism is nothing less than a Gentile heresy. Its results are now revealed in the fact that Christianity has been transformed into a religion of victimization. For centuries we have practiced our faith by building up ourselves as winners, survivors, the holders of ultimate truth, while we have denigrated the humanity of others. That is the source of evil. That is why Christianity has given birth to anti-Semitism. That is why the crusades were initiated to kill “infidels.” That is why we gave our blessing to such things as the divine right of kings, slavery, segregation, and apartheid. That is why we defined women as sub-human, childlike, and dependent. That is why we became homophobic. That is why we became child abusers and ideological killers. What human life needs is not a theology of human denigration. That is what atonement theology gives us. What we need is a theology of human fulfillment. ~ John Shelby Spong,

911:As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales. And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

912:There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It’s not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there’s an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It’s a very concentrated thing; you can’t think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there’s such a rich field. It’s astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . . but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks for years before I discovered tango! ~ Alan Lee,

913:Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross. ~ Hermann Hesse,

914:We’re all “storytellers.” We don’t call ourselves storytellers, but it’s what we do every day. Although we’ve been sharing stories for thousands of years, the skills we needed to succeed in the industrial age were very different from those required today. The ability to sell our ideas in the form of story is more important than ever. Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. In the information age, the knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Story is the means by which we transfer those ideas to one another. Your ability to package your ideas with emotion, context, and relevancy is the one skill that will make you more valuable in the next decade. Storytelling is the act of framing an idea as a narrative to inform, illuminate, and inspire. The Storyteller’s Secret is about the stories you tell to advance your career, build a company, pitch an idea, and to take your dreams from imagination to reality. When you pitch your product or service to a new customer, you’re telling a story. When you deliver instructions to a team or educate a class, you’re telling a story. When you build a PowerPoint presentation for your next sales meeting, you’re telling a story. When you sit down for a job interview and the recruiter asks about your previous experience, you’re telling a story. When you craft an e-mail, write a blog or Facebook post, or record a video for your company’s YouTube channel, you’re telling a story. But there’s a difference between a story, a good story, and a transformative story that builds trust, boosts sales, and inspires people to dream bigger. ~ Carmine Gallo,

915:I have run in the sun and felt the power of it. I have run for the tape, run against the clock, I have run with thousands and run with only myself for company. I have run around and around the track over and over again and run with no idea where I was going. I have run for no particular reason to any particular place. I have run to help my heart’s efficiency; I have run because my heart ached. I have run fast and felt more alive than ever and I have run to bury or fight something deep within. I have run when I knew I needed to and I have run when I knew I shouldn’t have. I have loathed running and I have praised running. I have run for a personal record and made it and I have run giving everything I had and come up just a bit short. I have run and let laughter and storytelling roll the miles away. I have felt the pounding of every single step in silent solitude. I have run enough to know that we sometimes feel like an old pair of shoes and sometimes we feel like new ones. I have run enough to know the difference between a hard, cold head wind and a brisk steady wind at our back. I have run enough to know that once you get out a certain distance you had better be able to get back. I have had runner friends who have poured out their guts to me about my place in their life, some who just said thanks or said nothing at all. I am simply a runner who has failed and succeeded, faded and surged, hoped, dreamed! Running has given me my greatest ideas, thoughts and moments of joy. To feel the “flow”, that feeling of peace, joy, timelessness, focus and clarity is an integral part of the human experience. ~ Anonymous,

916:THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION 1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. 2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’. 3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths. 4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. 5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world. 6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. 7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails. 8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us. ~ Paul Kingsnorth,

917:I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales. And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

918:That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever. ~ Doris Lessing,

919:The simple answer is that I have changed my techniques in order to avoid the relentless sameness of my material, but I have probably only found new costumes, not new creatures entirely. In the past, if I wanted to sound a note on a piano (in prose), I didn’t just have to purchase and install the piano, I had to build it. But before I built it I had to grow the trees whose wood would yield the piano, and probably I had to create the soil and landscape through which those trees would burst. Then there was the problem of the fucking seeds. Where did they come from? I had to source them. With such mania I was either onto something or I completely misunderstood what a fiction writer was supposed to do. Simple things, even entirely undramatic ones, could not occur unless I created them from whole cloth. I was superstitious about taking anything for granted, but it also locked me into a kind of fanatical object fondling that could, on a bad day, preclude any exploration of the human (even though the process of trying to remake the world on the page is fairly, pathetically, human). This set of interests kept me away from what is usually called narrative. It wasn’t some ideological position, or an artistic stance, it was just one set of obsessions winning out over another. On the other hand, I think that I have always tried to create feeling, and then to pulse it into the reader with language. It’s very difficult to figure out how to do this. Storytelling is one way — conventional narrative or whatever you want to call it — but are there other methods worth exploring? The ground shifts, and I change my mind about what might work. How to create immense, unforgettable feeling from language? This ambition hasn’t really changed, it’s just that I want to cultivate new approaches, to try to circle in on a more vivid way to accomplish it. ~ Ben Marcus,

920:Soon, I found myself criss-crossing the country with Steve, in what we called our “dog and pony show,” trying to drum up interest in our initial public offering. As we traveled from one investment house to another, Steve (in a costume he rarely wore: suit and tie) pushed to secure early commitments, while I added a professorial presence by donning, at Steve’s insistence, a tweed jacket with elbow patches. I was supposed to embody the image of what a “technical genius” looks like—though, frankly, I don’t know anyone in computer science who dresses that way. Steve, as pitch man, was on fire. Pixar was a movie studio the likes of which no one had ever seen, he said, built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology and original storytelling. We would go public one week after Toy Story opened, when no one would question that Pixar was for real. Steve turned out to be right. As our first movie broke records at the box office and as all our dreams seemed to be coming true, our initial public offering raised nearly $140 million for the company—the biggest IPO of 1995. And a few months later, as if on cue, Eisner called, saying that he wanted to renegotiate the deal and keep us as a partner. He accepted Steve’s offer of a 50/50 split. I was amazed; Steve had called this exactly right. His clarity and execution were stunning. For me, this moment was the culmination of such a lengthy series of pursuits, it was almost impossible to take in. I had spent twenty years inventing new technological tools, helping to found a company, and working hard to make all the facets of this company communicate and work well together. All of this had been in the service of a single goal: making a computer-animated feature film. And now, we’d not only done it; thanks to Steve, we were on steadier financial ground than we’d ever been before. For the first time since our founding, our jobs were safe. I ~ Ed Catmull,

921:The first time I read ‘Guts’, nobody fainted. My goal was just to write some new form of horror story, something based on the ordinary world. Without supernatural monster or magic. The would be a book you wouldn’t want to keep next to your bed. A book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power. A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to product to risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book… A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it’s difficult to call books a ‘mass medium’. No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades. But with that disregard comes the freedom that only books have. And if a storytelling is going to write novels instead of screenplays, that’s a freedom you need to exploit. Otherwise, write a movie. That’s where the big money’s at. Write for television. But, if you want the freedom to anywhere, talk about anything, then write books. That’s why I wrote ‘Guts’. Just a three-act short story based on true-life anecdotes. People write to say this story is the funniest they’ve ever heard. People write to say it’s the saddest they’ve ever heard. And ‘Guts’ is by no means the darkest or funniest or most upsetting story from the novel Haunted. Some, I didn’t dare read in public. These are the places that only books can go. This is the advantage that books still have. This is why I write. Thank you for reading my work. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,

922:It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections! ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

923:The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again: Oh, boy–they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

924:You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasise? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.’ ‘But still, the Fire of Life … it is just a fairy tale,’ insisted Dog the bear and Bear the dog, together. Nobodaddy drew himself up indignantly. ‘Do I look,’ he demanded, ‘like a fairy to you? Do I resemble, perhaps, an elf? Do gossamer wings sprout from my shoulders? Do you see even a trace of pixie dust? I tell you now that the Fire of Life is as real as I am, and that only that Unquenchable Blaze will do what you all wish done. It will turn bear into Man and dog into Dog-Man, and it will also be the End of Me. Luka! You little murderer! Your eyes light up at the very thought! How thrilling! I am amongst assassins! What are we waiting for, then? Are we starting now? Let’s be off! Tick, tock! There is no time to lose!’ At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody was gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighbourhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly coloured, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly coloured, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly coloured, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads? ~ Anonymous,

925:Give the Audience Something to Cheer For Austin Madison is an animator and story artist for such Pixar movies as Ratatouille, WALL-E, Toy Story 3, Brave, and others. In a revealing presentation Madison outlined the 7-step process that all Pixar movies follow. 1. Once there was a  . 3 [A protagonist/ hero with a goal is the most important element of a story.] 2. Every day he  . [The hero’s world must be in balance in the first act.] 3. Until one day  . [A compelling story introduces conflict. The hero’s goal faces a challenge.] 4. Because of that  . [This step is critical and separates a blockbuster from an average story. A compelling story isn’t made up of random scenes that are loosely tied together. Each scene has one nugget of information that compels the next scene.] 5. Because of that  . 6. Until finally   . [The climax reveals the triumph of good over evil.] 7. Ever since then  . [The moral of the story.] The steps are meant to immerse an audience into a hero’s journey and give the audience someone to cheer for. This process is used in all forms of storytelling: journalism, screenplays, books, presentations, speeches. Madison uses a classic hero/ villain movie to show how the process plays out—Star Wars. Here’s the story of Luke Skywalker. Once there was a farm boy who wanted to be a pilot. Every day he helped on the farm. Until one day his family is killed. Because of that he joins legendary Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi. Because of that he hires the smuggler Han Solo to take him to Alderaan. Until finally Luke reaches his goal and becomes a starfighter pilot and saves the day. Ever since then Luke’s been on the path to be a Jedi knight. Like millions of others, I was impressed with Malala’s Nobel Peace prize–winning acceptance speech. While I appreciated the beauty and power of her words, it wasn’t until I did the research for this book that I fully understood why Malala’s words inspired me. Malala’s speech perfectly follows Pixar’s 7-step storytelling process. I doubt that she did this intentionally, but it demonstrates once again the theme in this book—there’s a difference between a story, a good story, and a story that sparks movements. ~ Carmine Gallo,

926:Why are you so into Pinot?” 2 Maya asks. In the next 60 seconds of the movie, the character of Miles Raymond tells a story which would set off a boom in sales of Pinot Noir. It’s a hard grape to grow. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. In fact it can only grow in these really specific, tucked away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can coax it into its fullest expression. Its flavors are the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet. Miles is describing himself in the dialogue and using Pinot as a metaphor for his personality. In this one scene moviegoers projected themselves on the character, feeling his longing and his quest to be understood. Sideways was a hit and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. It also launched a movement, turning the misunderstood Pinot Noir into the must-have wine of the year. In less than one year after the movie’s 2004 fall release date, sales of Pinot Noir had risen 18 percent. Winemakers began to grow more of the grape to meet demand. In California alone 70,000 tons of Pinot Noir grapes were harvested and crushed in 2004. Within two years the volume had topped 100,000 tons. Today California wine growers crush more than 250,000 tons of Pinot Noir each year. Interestingly, the Japanese version of the movie did not have the same “Sideways Effect” on wine sales. One reason is that the featured grape is Cabernet, a varietal already popular in Japan. But even more critical and relevant to the discussion on storytelling is that Japanese audiences didn’t see the “porch scene” because there wasn’t one. The scene was not included in the movie. No story, no emotional attachment to a particular varietal. You see, the movie Sideways didn’t launch a movement in Pinot Noir; the story that Miles told triggered the boom. In 60 seconds Maya fell in love with Miles and millions of Americans fell in love with an expensive wine they knew little about. ~ Carmine Gallo,

927:If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present. ~ Alain de Botton,

928:Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time. So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again: Oh, boy—they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: ''There are right people to lynch.'' Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections! ~ Kurt Vonnegut,

929:The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills") ~ David J Schow,

930:In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act. Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling. Megaphone Guy is a storyteller, but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate—they go out too fast and to too broad an audience. Storytelling is a language-rich enterprise, but Megaphone Guy does not have time to generate powerful language. The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible. Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its own girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well-prepared it is—no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny—the place it is headed for is going to be very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do. ~ George Saunders,

931:It’s useful to make the distinction between reports and stories. A report is above all responsible for providing the facts, without manipulation or interpretation. Stories, on the other hand, are a way that people try to make sense of their lives and their experiences in the world. The test of a good story isn’t its responsibility to the facts as much as its ability to provide a satisfying explanation of events. In a few paragraphs, the reader learns of the problem (sales and profits are down), gets a plausible explanation (the company lost its direction), and learns a lesson (don’t stray, focus on the core). There’s a neat end with a clean resolution. No threads are left hanging. Readers go away satisfied. Now, there’s nothing wrong with stories, provided we understand that’s what we have before us. More insidious, however, are stories that are dressed up to look like science. They take the form of science and claim to have the authority of science, but they miss the real rigor and logic of science. They’re better described as pseudoscience. Richard Feynman had an even more memorable phrase: Cargo Cult Science. Here’s the way Feynman described it: In the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land. That’s not to say that Cargo Cult Science doesn’t have some benefits. The folks who wait patiently by the landing strips on their tropical island, dressed up like flight controllers and wearing a pair of coconut headsets, may derive some contentment from the whole process — they may live in hope of a better future, they may enjoy having something to believe in, and they may feel closer to supernatural powers. But it’s just that — it’s a story. It’s not a good predictor of what will happen next. The business world is full of Cargo Cult Science, books and articles that claim to be rigorous scientific research but operate mainly at the level of storytelling. ~ Philip M Rosenzweig,

932:Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you. First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected. Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, bestselling postmodern novelist known around the world for his boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. A few years before the end of his life, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class, Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.4 Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this nonreligious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshipping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, “Unless you’re worshipping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end. ~ Timothy J Keller,

933:History is storytelling,’” Yaw repeated. He walked down the aisles between the rows of seats, making sure to look each boy in the eye. Once he finished walking and stood in the back of the room, where the boys would have to crane their necks in order to see him, he asked, “Who would like to tell the story of how I got my scar?” The students began to squirm, their limbs growing limp and wobbly. They looked at each other, coughed, looked away. “Don’t be shy,” Yaw said, smiling now, nodding encouragingly. “Peter?” he asked. The boy who only seconds before had been so happy to speak began to plead with his eyes. The first day with a new class was always Yaw’s favorite. “Mr. Agyekum, sah?” Peter said. “What story have you heard? About my scar?” Yaw asked, smiling still, hoping, now to ease some of the child’s growing fear. Peter cleared his throat and looked at the ground. “They say you were born of fire,” he started. “That this is why you are so smart. Because you were lit by fire.” “Anyone else?” Timidly, a boy named Edem raised his hand. “They say your mother was fighting evil spirits from Asamando.” Then William: “I heard your father was so sad by the Asante loss that he cursed the gods, and the gods took vengeance.” Another, named Thomas: “I heard you did it to yourself, so that you would have something to talk about on the first day of class.” All the boys laughed, and Yaw had to stifle his own amusement. Word of his lesson had gotten around, he knew. The older boys told some of the younger ones what to expect from him. Still, he continued, making his way back to the front of the room to look at his students, the bright boys from the uncertain Gold Coast, learning the white book from a scarred man. “Whose story is correct?” Yaw asked them. They looked around at the boys who had spoken, as though trying to establish their allegiance by holding a gaze, casting a vote by sending a glance. Finally, once the murmuring subsided, Peter raised his hand. “Mr. Agyekum, we cannot know which story is correct.” He looked at the rest of the class, slowly understanding. “We cannot know which story is correct because we were not there.” Yaw nodded. He sat in his chair at the front of the room and looked at all the young men. “This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories. Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe, then?” The boys were silent. They stared at him, waiting. “We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture. ~ Yaa Gyasi,

934:Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others. ~ Martha C Nussbaum,

935:The Renzettis live in a small house at 84 Chestnut Avenue. Frank Renzetti is forty-four and works as a bookkeeper for a moving company. Mary Renzetti is thirty-five and works part-time at a day care. They have one child, Tommy, who is five. Frank’s widowed mother, Camila, also lives with the family. My question: How likely is it that the Renzettis have a pet? To answer that, most people would zero in on the family’s details. “Renzetti is an Italian name,” someone might think. “So are ‘Frank’ and ‘Camila.’ That may mean Frank grew up with lots of brothers and sisters, but he’s only got one child. He probably wants to have a big family but he can’t afford it. So it would make sense that he compensated a little by getting a pet.” Someone else might think, “People get pets for kids and the Renzettis only have one child, and Tommy isn’t old enough to take care of a pet. So it seems unlikely.” This sort of storytelling can be very compelling, particularly when the available details are much richer than what I’ve provided here. But superforecasters wouldn’t bother with any of that, at least not at first. The first thing they would do is find out what percentage of American households own a pet. Statisticians call that the base rate—how common something is within a broader class. Daniel Kahneman has a much more evocative visual term for it. He calls it the “outside view”—in contrast to the “inside view,” which is the specifics of the particular case. A few minutes with Google tells me about 62% of American households own pets. That’s the outside view here. Starting with the outside view means I will start by estimating that there is a 62% chance the Renzettis have a pet. Then I will turn to the inside view—all those details about the Renzettis—and use them to adjust that initial 62% up or down. It’s natural to be drawn to the inside view. It’s usually concrete and filled with engaging detail we can use to craft a story about what’s going on. The outside view is typically abstract, bare, and doesn’t lend itself so readily to storytelling. So even smart, accomplished people routinely fail to consider the outside view. The Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once predicted trouble for the Democrats because polls had found that George W. Bush’s approval rating, which had been rock-bottom at the end of his term, had rebounded to 47% four years after leaving office, equal to President Obama’s. Noonan found that astonishing—and deeply meaningful.9 But if she had considered the outside view she would have discovered that presidential approval always rises after a president leaves office. Even Richard Nixon’s number went up. So Bush’s improved standing wasn’t surprising in the least—which strongly suggests the meaning she drew from it was illusory. Superforecasters don’t make that mistake. If Bill Flack were asked whether, in the next twelve months, there would be an armed clash between China and Vietnam over some border dispute, he wouldn’t immediately delve into the particulars of that border dispute and the current state of China-Vietnam relations. He would instead look at how often there have been armed clashes in the past. “Say we get hostile conduct between China and Vietnam every five years,” Bill says. “I’ll use a five-year recurrence model to predict the future.” In any given year, then, the outside view would suggest to Bill there is a 20% chance of a clash. Having established that, Bill would look at the situation today and adjust that number up or down. ~ Philip E Tetlock,

936:Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves. ~ Jay Griffiths,

937:O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy? Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question. O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre. O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction. P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that. (Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself. ~ Terry Pratchett,

   2 Integral Yoga
   1 Psychology
   1 Poetry


   2 The Mother
   2 Satprem

0 1963-08-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    I had that tendency very strongly in the past; thats what I called Storytellingeverything, everything became stories: all the work, all that had to be done. But I stopped it completely, completely, as a dangerous thingit gives a great material power (thats probably why the Swami asked you to do it), what it gives is a material power, but its VERY bad, it falsifies all that comes from above.    ***

0 1969-02-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga    Its way of working (I think Ive already told you once or twice) is a sort of Storytelling based on experiences, memories, very small dormant things that seemed to be gone, and which awaken for the experience to become concrete. So then, all that unfolds, with the human sensation, human vision, human understanding (even the most spiritual understanding, I might say), and at the same time this Presence. And then the Presence brings the TRUE understanding. Something wonderful.    (silence)

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   consist of rationalizations of them. And the longer we look at myths, or Storytelling patterns, the more   clearly their links with primary concern stand out.... This rooting of poetic myth in primary concern

1.asak - Rise early at dawn, when our storytelling begins, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   object:1.asak - Rise early at dawn, when our Storytelling begins   author class:Abu-Said Abil-Kheir   --    English version by Vraje Abramian Original Language Persian/Farsi Rise early at dawn, when our Storytelling begins. In the dead of the night, when all other doors are locked, the door for the Lovers to enter opens. Be wide awake in the dark when Lovers begin fluttering around the Beloved's window, like homing pigeons arriving with flaming bodies. [1472.jpg] -- from Nobody, Son of Nobody: Poems of Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, Translated by Vraje Abramian <

Blazing P1 - Preconventional consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   engendered by Storytelling), and elsewhere, e.g., in distant space, as well as the mental division   of objects and collections into parts, etc. The practical reversibility of the sensorimotor

BS 1 - Introduction to the Idea of God, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction   Jung got very interested in dreams, and he started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths. He was deeply read in mythology, and he would see, in his clients dreams, echoes of stories that he knew. He started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes: the dream and the story, and Storytelling. You can tell your dreams as stories, when you remember them, and some people remember dreams all the timetwo or three, at night. Ive had clients like that. They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures. I think thats more the case with people who are creativeespecially if theyre a bit unstable at the timebecause the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty, and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality, before you get a real grip on it. So the dream is the birthplace of thinking. Thats a good way of thinking about it, because its not that clear. Its doing its best to formulate something. That was Jungs notion, as of post-Freud, who believed that there were internal censors that were hiding the dreams true message. Thats not what Jung believed. He believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated, conscious comprehension.   A thought appears in your head, right? Thats obvious. Bangits nothing you ever asked about. What the hell does that mean? A thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? It just doesn't help with anything. Where does it come from? Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head. Thats not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out. You might think that those thoughts that you think...Well, where do they come from? Theyre often someone elses thoughtssomeone long dead. That might be part of itjust like the words you use to think are utterances of people who have been long dead. Youre informed by the spirit of your ancestors. Thats one way of looking at it.

Wikipedia - Damsel in distress -- Theme in storytelling, stock character; a noble Lady in need of rescue, traditionally from dragons

Wikipedia - Hero's journey -- Pattern in storytelling

Wikipedia - Interactive storytelling

Wikipedia - Kamishibai -- Form of Japanese street theatre and storytelling

Wikipedia - List of storytelling events -- Wikipedia list article

Wikipedia - Organizational storytelling

Wikipedia - Running gag -- Literary device that takes the form of an amusing joke or a comical reference and appears repeatedly throughout a work of literature or other form of storytelling

Wikipedia - Story arc -- Extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media

Wikipedia - Storybook Dads -- Charity helping prisoners maintain connections with their children through storytelling

Wikipedia - Storytelling device

Wikipedia - Storytelling (film) -- 2001 film by Todd Solondz

Wikipedia - Storytelling System

Wikipedia - Storytelling

Wikipedia - The Beginner's Guide -- 2015 interactive storytelling video game

Wikipedia - Transmedia storytelling

Wikipedia - Upworthy -- Website dedicated to positive storytelling (started March 2012)

Wikipedia - World Storytelling Day

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10074829-storytelling-l-informazione-secondo-luther-blissett

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10765692-the-new-digital-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1131157.The_Leader_s_Guide_to_Storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12743473-the-storytelling-animal

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12958711-visual-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17938931-presentation-zen-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19409281-ted-talks-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19928740-a-practical-guide-to-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238132.Storytelling_in_Organizations

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24820083-storytelling-with-our-students-techniques-for-telling-tales-from-around

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25282444-storytelling-for-startups

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25798288-kidz-n-critters---a-storytelling-activity-book

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28444086-storytelling-tips

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/292001.The_Politics_of_Storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33474.Graphic_Storytelling_and_Visual_Narrative

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34349847-the-new-digital-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34696391-design-is-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35117505-storytelling-made-easy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36247778-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36297644-storytelling-in-the-age-of-distraction

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37955557-magic-of-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38643092-storytelling-alchemy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40184158-live-thriving-at-the-30th-national-storytelling-festival

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/407318.Storytelling_in_the_New_Hollywood

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43183121-the-science-of-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44556207-procedural-storytelling-in-game-design

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/584813.Pete_Seeger_s_Storytelling_Book

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6056929-the-art-and-craft-of-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/734885.Storytelling_in_Film_and_Television

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7381317-interactive-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7708589-storytelling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7870513-active-storytelling

Kheper - / -- 7

Kheper - storytelling index -- 7

http://malankazlev.com/storytelling/sff/space-opera/ -- 0

http://malankazlev.com/storytelling/space-opera.html -- 0

http://malankazlev.com/storytelling/worldbuilding/index.html -- 0

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InDefenceOfStorytelling

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InteractiveStorytellingTropes

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NonLinearStorytelling

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SecondHandStorytelling

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeparateSceneStorytelling

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Storytelling

The Flip Wilson Show (1970 - 1974) - The Flip Wilson Show was the first successful network variety series with an African-American star. In its first two seasons, its Nielsen ratings placed it as America's second most-watched show. Flip Wilson based his storytelling humor on his background in black clubs, but adapted easily to a televi...

Charlie and Lola (2005 - 2008) - Animation following a boy's efforts to get his stubborn little sister to try new things. Through wild and fanciful storytelling and visuals, Charlie and Lola struggle to understand each other and the world around them. Based from the popular book series by Lauren Child.

Mathica's Mathshop (1993 - 1994) - Mathica's Mathshop is a math tutorial TV series produced for TVO from 1993-1994. The 15-minute programs focus on teaching basic mathematics for primary grades by incorporating storytelling with the principles of the subject. Every program presents math through a familiar fairytale context which enco...

My Bedbugs (2004 - 2005) - Three siblings teach positive life lessons through storytelling and songs.

American Pop(1981) - Journey into an explosion of sight, sound, song and superb storytelling as brilliantly conceived by animation innovator Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, The Lord of the Rings, Wizards). From a turn-of-the-century immigrant vaudevillian to a rock superstar, American Pop is the story of four generations w...

16 Days Of Glory(1986) - The definitive photographic record of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, told "from the inside" through the lives of the participants, the words of David Perry, and the singing voice of Placido Domingo. From the opening to closing ceremonies, this unique style of storytelling shows a side of the Olympic...

Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj ::: TV-MA | 25min | Comedy, News, Talk-Show | TV Series (20182020) -- In this weekly show, the former Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj brings his unique comedic voice and storytelling skill to explore the larger grim trends shaping our fragmented world. Creators:

Storytelling (2001) ::: 6.8/10 -- R | 1h 27min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 22 February 2002 (Canada) -- College and high school serve as the backdrop for two stories about dysfunction and personal turmoil. Director: Todd Solondz Writer: Todd Solondz

https://disneyfairies.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling-talent

https://elt.fandom.com/wiki/Teaching_Proficiency_through_Reading_and_Storytelling

https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Heroic_Storytelling

https://galactic-crucibles.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling_guide

https://historyfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling_guide

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_storytelling_cheats

https://swg.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Chronicles_of_Darkness_Revised_Storytelling_System_Rulebook

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Chronicles_of_Darkness:_Revised_Storytelling_System_Rulebook

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Chronicles_of_Darkness:_Revised_Storytelling_System_Rulebookdom.com/wiki/Mercury

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Merit_(Storytelling_System)

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Revised_Storytelling_System

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling_Adventure_System

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling_game

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Storytelling_System

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Street_Fighter:_The_Storytelling_Game

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Vice_(Storytelling_System)

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Virtue_and_Vice_(Storytelling_System)

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/World_of_Darkness:_Storytelling_System_Rulebook

Genius Party Beyond -- -- Studio 4°C -- 5 eps -- Original -- Sci-Fi Music Dementia Fantasy -- Genius Party Beyond Genius Party Beyond -- Containing shorts that couldn't be included in the original, Genius Party Beyond weaves stories that are both deep and insightful: the idea all life is relative in size, the consequences of an oppressive government, and how to deal with your darker desires, among others. -- -- From the directors and artists of works such as Samurai Champloo, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Akira, come a multitude of thought-provoking tales, to create a collection equalling the original in storytelling genius. -- -- Movie - Oct 11, 2008 -- 16,643 7.22

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Sotsu -- -- - -- ? eps -- Visual novel -- Mystery Dementia Horror Psychological Supernatural Thriller -- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Sotsu Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Sotsu -- Sequel to Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Gou. -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- TV - Jul ??, 2021 -- 22,024 N/A -- -- Yami Shibai 4 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 4 Yami Shibai 4 -- Excited children gather around the enigmatic masked Storyteller once more. His unique kamishibai storytelling draws them into tales of fear and dread. These are dark and foreboding stories, which could happen to anyone... -- -- This season has tales of a salaryman who buries a dead cat, only to be haunted soon after; a college student and her cheap new apartment that hides a ghastly secret; boys exploring an abandoned haunted house before coming across a strange fish tank; a man who finds himself on the wrong bus, and in more danger than he thought possible; and a young couple's visit to an amusement park, which suddenly takes a dark turn. All these stories and more await in Yami Shibai 4. -- -- 21,571 5.73

Nanatsu no Taizai Movie 2: Hikari ni Norowareshi Mono-tachi -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Supernatural Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Nanatsu no Taizai Movie 2: Hikari ni Norowareshi Mono-tachi Nanatsu no Taizai Movie 2: Hikari ni Norowareshi Mono-tachi -- (No synopsis yet.) -- Movie - Jul 2, 2021 -- 19,058 N/A -- -- Yami Shibai 5 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 5 Yami Shibai 5 -- The mysterious masked Storyteller returns to tell more twisted tales of horror. Continuing his particular style of kamishibai inspired storytelling, he now finds that his audience is an eerie crowd of young girls, who eagerly await his devilish stories. -- -- He recounts ghostly legends involving girls of all ages: a housewife who receives a barrage of chilling phone calls; a strange girl whose flower readings are always right; a mother and daughter's ominous meeting with the "crow lady"; and a young girl whose demands from others grow more and more outrageous with each request. Witness once again the Storyteller's haunting and gripping tales, which are sure to leave one with more than just chills... -- -- 19,027 6.30

Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu -- -- Studio Deen -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Drama Historical Josei -- Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu -- Yotarou is a former yakuza member fresh out of prison and fixated on just one thing: rather than return to a life of crime, the young man aspires to take to the stage of Rakugo, a traditional Japanese form of comedic storytelling. Inspired during his incarceration by the performance of distinguished practitioner Yakumo Yuurakutei, he sets his mind on meeting the man who changed his life. After hearing Yotarou's desperate appeal for his mentorship, Yakumo is left with no choice but to accept his very first apprentice. -- -- As he eagerly begins his training, Yotarou meets Konatsu, an abrasive young woman who has been under Yakumo's care ever since her beloved father Sukeroku Yuurakutei, another prolific Rakugo performer, passed away. Through her hidden passion, Yotarou is drawn to Sukeroku's unique style of Rakugo despite learning under contrasting techniques. Upon seeing this, old memories and feelings return to Yakumo who reminisces about a much earlier time when he made a promise with his greatest rival. -- -- Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu is a story set in both the past and present, depicting the art of Rakugo, the relationships it creates, and the lives and hearts of those dedicated to keeping the unique form of storytelling alive. -- -- 231,915 8.60

Yami Shibai 2 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 2 Yami Shibai 2 -- For the second time, the masked storyteller returns to tell children tales and legends of horror and woe, such as the tale of a ventriloquist's dummy, a locker that grants wishes, a capsule toy machine that returns lost possessions, and a strange food called Ominie-san. -- -- Building on the foundation that was laid by the first, Yami Shibai 2 is a collection of Japanese scary stories of the unknown and the occult that are truly terrifying, narrated in a style of art that mimics kamishibai storytelling. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- TV - Jul 7, 2014 -- 38,170 6.50

Yami Shibai 2 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 2 Yami Shibai 2 -- For the second time, the masked storyteller returns to tell children tales and legends of horror and woe, such as the tale of a ventriloquist's dummy, a locker that grants wishes, a capsule toy machine that returns lost possessions, and a strange food called Ominie-san. -- -- Building on the foundation that was laid by the first, Yami Shibai 2 is a collection of Japanese scary stories of the unknown and the occult that are truly terrifying, narrated in a style of art that mimics kamishibai storytelling. -- -- TV - Jul 7, 2014 -- 38,170 6.50

Yami Shibai 3 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 3 Yami Shibai 3 -- A young boy silently sketches out the forms of the horrors that dwell in his mind. During this adventure into the occult and mysterious, he tells tales that involve dreams of a person with a muscular arm that you must not look at, a hospital with a room that holds a grim secret, and a visit to an eerily silent taxidermy museum. -- -- These tales and more are compiled in Yami Shibai 3. Presented in an art style similar to kamishibai storytelling, this horror series stays true to the gruesome and creepy trend that is prominent in Yami Shibai and Yami Shibai 2nd Season. -- -- 28,685 6.29

Yami Shibai 4 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 4 Yami Shibai 4 -- Excited children gather around the enigmatic masked Storyteller once more. His unique kamishibai storytelling draws them into tales of fear and dread. These are dark and foreboding stories, which could happen to anyone... -- -- This season has tales of a salaryman who buries a dead cat, only to be haunted soon after; a college student and her cheap new apartment that hides a ghastly secret; boys exploring an abandoned haunted house before coming across a strange fish tank; a man who finds himself on the wrong bus, and in more danger than he thought possible; and a young couple's visit to an amusement park, which suddenly takes a dark turn. All these stories and more await in Yami Shibai 4. -- -- 21,571 5.73

Yami Shibai 5 -- -- ILCA -- 13 eps -- Original -- Dementia Horror Supernatural -- Yami Shibai 5 Yami Shibai 5 -- The mysterious masked Storyteller returns to tell more twisted tales of horror. Continuing his particular style of kamishibai inspired storytelling, he now finds that his audience is an eerie crowd of young girls, who eagerly await his devilish stories. -- -- He recounts ghostly legends involving girls of all ages: a housewife who receives a barrage of chilling phone calls; a strange girl whose flower readings are always right; a mother and daughter's ominous meeting with the "crow lady"; and a young girl whose demands from others grow more and more outrageous with each request. Witness once again the Storyteller's haunting and gripping tales, which are sure to leave one with more than just chills... -- -- 19,027 6.30

Alaska Native storytelling

Biblical storytelling

Digital storytelling

Gamaka (storytelling)

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative

Indigenous storytelling in North America

Interactive storytelling

Katha (storytelling format)

On Conan Doyle; or, The Whole Art of Storytelling

Organizational storytelling

Storytelling

Storytelling (Belle and Sebastian album)

Storytelling (disambiguation)

Storytelling (film)

Storytelling game

Storytelling System

Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game

The Art of Storytelling

TPR Storytelling

Transmedia storytelling

World Storytelling Day