“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.” PeopleImportantHumanityTruth IsMusic IsJazzAidsStorytellingRecoveryTelling The TruthMelodyJazz Music Author:Cecil Williams
“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.” ThinkingWorldSchoolFilmDarkPowerfulActingAudienceCollegeStorytellingVery Powerful Author:Rachel Weisz
“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.” ThinkingTermActingStorytellingCompliment Author:Thomas Sadoski
“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.” ThinkingWritingSongDistanceCleverStorytellingHopefullyAccomplished Author:Ben Gibbard
“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.” WritingActingPossibilityExcitingInspiredStorytelling Author:Cynthia Addai-Robinson
“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.” LiteratureInterestCommonDiversityVariousStorytelling Author:Aleksandar Hemon
“The fashion industry is all about storytelling and craftsmanship. Sustainability adds value because it makes that backstory even more impactful.” ValuesFashionStorytellingSustainabilityFashion IndustryCraftsmanship Author:Miroslava Duma
“Sci-fi has just become an effects-fest, and the story has taken a back seat to all that eye candy. To me, that's not really storytelling; that's just showcasing the latest gadgetry.” EyeTakenStorytellingCandy Author:Daniel Myrick
“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.” ImportantRealCharacterLove IsEnvironmentImagineStorytellingClassic Author:Antoine Fuqua
“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.” TryingImportantDoneStorytelling Author:Tim Kring
“I do think you learn things about genre storytelling, but you also have to be careful not to learn too much.” ThinkingCarefulStorytellingBe Careful Author:David Eick
“We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.” RealityDistanceStorytelling Author:Joshua Oppenheimer
“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.” PeopleThinkingMomentsOpportunityNaturalActingFantasyImagineIllusionDirectInvisibleStorytelling Author:Joshua Oppenheimer
“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.” PeopleThinkingFantasyImagineStorytellingImagine ThatDisbelief Author:Joshua Oppenheimer
“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.” SchoolInterestingHigh SchoolLibraryStorytellingMelancholyPunkFolk Music Author:Bradford Cox
“I think a culture can really be elevated through the arts, and it's always a dream come true when I come across roles that enable me to fuse my love of storytelling with my passion for activism and raising social awareness.” ThinkingArtDreamCulturePassionAwarenessActivismStorytellingDreams Come TrueMy Passion Author:Nazanin Boniadi
“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.” ThinkingEmotionCarConcernOkayStorytelling Author:Luc Besson
“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.” EnoughAudienceAchieveEmotionalStorytellingIntimacyLook At Me Author:Paul F. Tompkins
“There's no harmony in most people in a way, and I'm attracted to it, and I think it makes for good storytelling.” PeopleThinkingWayHarmonyStorytellingGood Storytelling Author:Greg Kinnear
“I so love the animation process. Interesting, everything that I do in animation, the kind of crafting and skills of storytelling, totally work within the structure of the Disney nature films. In a weird way, I like to think that animation is like painting, and Disney nature is like sculpting. Animation you start with a blank canvas and you paint. With Disney nature, you start with a big block of imagery and you hone it down into your final story. Somewhere you end up with something kind of pretty to watch.” ThinkingKindFilmInterestingPaintingPaintStorytellingBlockCanvasAnimationImageryBlank Canvas Author:Roy Conli
“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."” ThinkingDifferentCharacterChallengesComfortStorytelling Author:Tatiana Maslany
“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.” ThinkingWritingBelieveKindMeanCareI BelieveMusic IsSingingStorytellingI Care Author:Aneurin Barnard
“Storytelling is very important. It is through context and relations that we understand the importance of human dignity. The concept means nothing as an abstraction. It's important for us to understand why people do the things they do, including the monsters - the suicide bomber and the war criminal. Understanding is not acceptance. Understanding is exploring the human psyche. If we want to put an end to violence, we need to have the sort of conversation I had with the teenage suicide bomber.” PeopleMeanImportantWarUnderstandingViolenceAcceptanceDignityImportanceRelationSuicideStorytellingExploringTeenageHuman Dignity Author:Payam Akhavan
“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.” HelpingGoalLeaderSuccessfulTeamDisciplineFitAchievementDeserveExcitingIntentionAppreciationStorytellingMemorableStorytellerAcknowledgementPrioritize Author:Gary A. Klein
“I have a theory that, for people of color or others who have been cut out of the master narrative, just telling your personal survival tale, your story, is civic engagement. It is a kind of political performance and is really crucial in that storytelling is how the writers connect with people and change. It's how we collect and add to and complicate the master narrative.” PeopleKindPoliticalCuttingSurvivalStorytelling Author:Faith Adiele
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” IfsWritingStoriesFormHistoryTaughtForgottenStorytellingStorytellerTelling StoriesGood Storytelling Author:Rudyard Kipling
“Storytelling excites me. Nothing gets me more juiced up than having an impact on people.” PeopleStorytelling Author:Alrick Brown
“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.” PeopleBelieveCareLiteratureIndividualTraditionStorytellingArroganceDownfallNobody Cares Author:Larry Fessenden
“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.” PeopleWorldMeanCharacterFilmActingEmotionHuman NatureIncrediblesStorytelling Author:Tatiana Maslany
“My passion is writing comics and storytelling, and I'm constantly working to improve. I hit my deadlines, I know how to work with and artists, I'm professional, and I bring my A-game every time.” WritingArtistPassionStorytellingMy PassionDeadline Author:Hope Larson
“Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.” GivingWritingTryingDoneMomentsProblemPastConsciousnessConcernedStorytellingComplexityHurdle Author:Chris Ware
“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.” BookStorytellingOnlineGoing Away Author:Margaret Atwood
“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.” ThinkingWritingTryingMindRiskDangerousLike YouTrackStorytellingPuzzlesNeat Author:Andrew Bujalski
“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.” ThinkingWritingBookRealityCommonStorytelling Author:Lawrence Wright
“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.” TryingKindLongFilmDialogueStorytellingAll Kinds Author:Richard Linklater
“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.” PeopleThinkingWorldStrongDifficultInterestingAcceptingComedySlaveryStorytellingDepressing Author:James McBride
“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.” PeopleTryingMovingHouseStudyStorytellingGet BetterComplexityRejoiceLament Author:Stephen Jay Gould
“I think that any good storytelling lends itself to closing a chapter but also knowing that there's a few more volumes beyond that to dream off of.” ThinkingDreamStorytelling Author:Milo Ventimiglia
“What I had found after the success of Karate Kid II is that an actor basically needs to - a primary requirement on my part as how I view as actor is you have to create a background, you have to create a history of that character and place her into the script that you're reading and carry on forward because you don't know how the future unfolds. This is what storytelling is you place a certain set of circumstances with a certain set of characters and you see what unfolds after an event happens.” CharacterKidsReadingCircumstancesStorytellingKarate Author:Tamlyn Tomita
“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.” PastHealingGrowing UpViolenceQuietAbuseShameGuiltStorytellingDirtyOur FamilyDomestic ViolenceEmpoweredMy PastLaundry Author:Kambri Crews
“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.” DoneStorytellingValentineJugglingQuentinTarantino Author:Derek Cianfrance
“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.” ThinkingWorldRealRealityProtectEverydayInvisibleHorribleStorytellingManifestFilmmakingRainbowExploring Author:Joshua Oppenheimer
“We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that's often the clichéd way that storytelling is talked about, as someone taking a solo, and that's great for lots of reasons. But I don't really like to feel like I'm forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it's for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.” PeopleThinkingReasonActionReadingCommunityStorytellingMultiplicity Author:Vijay Iyer
“I use my platform for more than just myself. Art is a reflection of human emotions. To neglect the political is to neglect what essentially is your job of storytelling. I would rather be known for the content of my character than for the project that I did.” ArtCharacterPoliticalEmotionReflectionArt IsStorytellingNeglect Author:Zendaya
“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.” PeopleAncientStorytelling Author:Rosario Dawson
“As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, "Tell me about the good work that you're doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give." It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.” PeopleGivingKindCountryHelpingUnderstandingPoorPovertyStorytellingIntroducingGood WorkPoor People Author:Katherine Boo
“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.” PeopleUnderstandingAbilityAudienceDisciplineUniqueStorytellingElsewhereExceptionalSkepticalOpen MindOpen Minded Author:Tom Rosenstiel
“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.” MindGoalStorytelling Author:Tom Brevoort
“Everyone who's ever met Guillermo Del Toro knows that he's the most generous, creative, mind-bogglingly wonderful man. And I was so lucky that he had seen Storytelling and he asked me to do Hellboy. And then I watched Devil's Backbone and I was blown away.” MenCreativeWonderfulLuckyStorytellingGenerousBackboneSo LuckyCreative Mind Author:Selma Blair
“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.” PeopleThinkingWantTryingLooksProjectsEntertainmentStorytellingJust BeingPulse Author:Ashton Kutcher