All of our lives are a living, breathing story, and each heartbeat means a new page has been turned; chapters don’t close, they continue.

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That’s the story I want to tell all the time. It’s the story I wanted to live – somebody who appears to be, or is, weak...

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called.

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to...

Stories give color to black and white information.

By telling stories, Jesus isn’t somehow putting sugar in a spoon to make the medicine go down a bit easier. These stories are the medicine. These stories are an extension and explanation of Jesus’ revolutionary...

All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth — yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes...

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

Don’t be scared of scars. They just tell stories that are hard to hear.

My characters don’t always know more than the reader does, because my readers get the best seat in Paper House.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know...

The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.

The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary...

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It’s just too bad.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part,...

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

…What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

Good storytellers are always ready for the next question.

That’s the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can’t share it.

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if...

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls…

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The...

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

A story is never complete.

What if things happened to you—special, magic things—because you’d been preparing for them?

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

…required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you’re really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.

That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?

There’s a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of...

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue...

Magic is the most interesting art because people not necessarily want to learn to paint after they see a great painting, but they want to learn magic after they see a great magic effect.

Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply...

But Andrew was right about one thing. Human beings need to tell stories. Historically, it’s the quickest way we have for transmitting useful information to other members of our species. Stories are not simply nice...

I believe stories have a will of their own, one that surpasses in volition that of their teller. In realms of Storytelling, stories control their bearers, and eventually, their hearers as well.

I’ll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I’ll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I’ll write long sad tales about people in the legend...

As long as we share our stories, as long as our stories reveal our strengths and vulnerabilities to each other, we reinvigorte our understanding and tolerance for the little quirks of personality that in other...

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

It is a law of the story-teller’s art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.

Real life is never quite as interesting as the story told afterward.

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

Hip-hop is storytelling.