Best Quotes about Storytelling
Best Quotes about Storytelling
Great quotes about storytelling and quotes by great storytellers inspire us to dig deep and to tell our best stories.
1. “Storytelling is among the oldest forms of human communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times.” –Rives Collins
2. “There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.” –JK Rowling
3. “You must stay drunk on writing, so reality cannot destroy you.” –Ray Bradbury
4. “At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.” –Anne Lamott
5. “The basic rule of storytelling is ‘show, don’t tell.’ –Julianna Baggott
6. “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” –Jonathan Gottschall
7. “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” –Anne Lamott
8. “Connect with your audience through stories people love.” –Shafqat Islam
9. “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” –Robert McKee
10. “The power of storytelling is exactly this: to bridge the gaps where everything else has crumbled.” –Paulo Coelho
11. Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, or predicting, of planning, and of explaining.” –Mark Turner
12. “Stories constitute the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal.” –Dr. Howard Gardner
13. “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” –Brandon Sanderson
14. “Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses.” –Aleks Krotoski
15. “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” –CS Lewis
16. “One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way, and that perhaps even the substance of the sentence has never been felt. Every sentence is an innovation.” –John Cheever
17. “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.” –Ray Bradbury
18. “I think I learned as much as I could from Hemingway because he made it look easy. There was always a lot of whitespace on his pages. There’d be dialogue straight down and just a little bit of description of people. But you knew from the way they were talking, what they said, you knew who the characters were.” –Elmore Leonard
19. “Just sit down and shamelessly write the thing yourself.” –Seymour Glass
20. “The best advice for writing a book comes from Miles Davis. Davis said this, ‘It’s easy. I always listen for what I can best leave out.’” –Matt Weiland
21. “Everyone hates to outline—when I tell kids that I outline every book, they hate it! No one likes to outline—but I can’t work without one. I think that’s the reason I’m so prolific—I take a week and I plan everything. I do all the thinking beforehand.” –RL Stine
22. “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened.” –Willa Cather
23. “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.” –Eudora Welty
24. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” –Ernest Hemingway
25. “That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.” –CS Lewis
26. “Stories create community, enable us to see through the eyes of other people, and open us to the claims of others.” –Peter Forbes
27. “There is no greater power on this earth than story.” –Libba Bray
28. “You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.” –Margaret Atwood
29. “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” –Ira Glass
30. “tell me the facts, and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in heart forever.” –Native American Proverb
31. “You can’t write unless you read.” –David Sedaris
32. “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demand the redemptive act, that demands what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.” –Flannery O’Connor
33. “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” –Mark Twain
34. “Successful authorship isn’t a formula. It requires individuality, thoughtfulness, and critical thinking.” –Jane Friedman
35. “You write from what you know but you write into what you don’t know.” –Grace Paley
36. “The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.” –Ralph Ellison
37. “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” –Maya Angelou
38. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” –Toni Morrison
39. “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” –Langston Hughes
40. “I write to discover what I know.” –Flannery O’Connor
41. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.” –Joan Didion
42. “The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty.” –Donna Tartt
43. “The more you read the better you’re going to become as a storyteller.” –Stan Lee
44. “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” –Ray Bradbury
45. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” –Harper Lee
46. “Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” –Grace Paley
47. “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy and that hard.” –Neil Gaiman
48. “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” –Mark Twain
49. “I believe one way we learn tolerance, understanding, and acceptance is through story.” –Anna Schmidt
50. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” –Flannery O’Connor
Great quotes inspire great writing, which is exactly what we at The Storyteller Agency aspire to do on a daily basis—tell great stories passionately and creatively. If you need help telling your story, click here to contact us, and we will be in touch.
