Storytelling Quotes

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“Every great love starts with a great story...”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green

“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
― Stephen King

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

“Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it."

[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]”
― John Green

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."

“Beautiful and full of monsters?"

“All the best stories are.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.”
― Mia Couto

“funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather

“You can fix anything but a blank page.”
― Nora Roberts

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris May Lessing, UNDER MY SKIN--VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”
― Mary Higgins Clark

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works

“My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.”
― Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.”
― Daniel Wallace, The Kings and Queens of Roam

“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.

— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón”
― Mitch Glazer